Journeyman
by skywalker05
Summary: Abandoned by Sidious, Darth Maul tries to find his place by retracing his steps in the wake of his brother's death.
1. Chapter 1

_ You have travelled a long way, my apprentice._

_ You waited for this. I should have seen your urge to build an empire. That age-old instinct of the Sith could not quite be quelled, even in you, the one who was always meant to be the sacrificial animal. The spirits of Darth Bane and Freedon Nadd, the old ones, all of them flow through you via the Force just as they do through me. The past is never as important as the present, but I should have known._

_ And I did know, Darth Maul, from the moment you bit my hand. You were a boy, then, but those small realizations did not stop as you aged, even though you learned the same lessons over and over. First you learned that I was breaking the Rule of Two, and then you learned who _I _was breaking it against: Darth Plagueis, the late great father of too much dark life. He achieved almost enough to create his own Chosen One before I killed him. Then, you, Darth Maul, would never have survived at all._

_ But now the playing field is a bit more _level_. Plagueis is dead, my Chosen One thinks he is the most righteous man in the galaxy and will even more so now, after his Padawan walks out of the Jedi Temple to get away from him. We are all just fathers watching our children leave us, my apprentice. I doubt you'll live to understand. It's what we do after that matters. It is how we turn our hatred for our children into greatness. _

_ But that is all permutations, options, possibilities - you don't operate like that, do you? There's one thing in your mind, one at a time. In creating that focus, I have succeeded completely._

_ You tried to fight me, here on Mandalore. You tried to create your own small empire out of rocks and dirt and blind beings leading the blind._

_ Mandalore._

_ I trained you to rule men, certainly. That is the way of the Sith. We must know _some _subterfuge. But look at you. Even on the black ground of this plaza, even with your clothing torn and your skin burnt and smoking, your instinct is not to rally help from anyone else. They have all left you, your brother dead and the Mandalorians engaged in their private war of political and parochial revenge. _

_ You snarl up at me and are poised, perfectly, alone._

_ I cannot kill you yet. It would be like tearing up a symphony._

_ But I cannot have you around, either, following me to Coruscant like a stray dog. _Look at you. _It's a fortunate bit of chance that Zabraks look so much like the devils of human stories, and utterly convenient that the Dathomirians made you even more fearsome with their marks. Ithorians and Devaronians and sentient blobs of gas hold seats in the Senate, and Zabraks too, but you were raised to walk like a monster, and you would never survive in the congress. A perfect assassin, you are a terrible spy._

_ You are still trying to rise, the Force lurching and crackling inside your presence. When the lightning hits you you fall again, panting, sparks jumping between your jaws. _

_ "I will not kill you yet," your master says. "I still have plans for you."_

* * *

Darth Maul slumped with his hands between his knees as if he had been cuffed.

He had not. Sidious was surely testing him, allowing him to sit freely in the rearmost, smallest passenger compartment of this lavish, sleek ship and watching his every move. It was odd to be back in his master's presence, thinking these thoughts. For a long time he had just wanted to get back to Sidious, to bow before him again, to take orders. Then, after Sidious had killed Savage just as Maul was beginning to feel a grudging respect for him that may or may not have had its roots in their familial bond, Maul had realized that his master had discarded him. All Maul's work, all the time he had spent fighting across the galaxy to make a massacre big enough to draw Sidious' attention, had failed. He raged against his master, lifting hands that felt as heavy as if they had been chained. He growled, lips pulled back from his teeth. It ached to move. The Force lightning had not scarred him, but it hurt. It would hurt, he knew, for days, and the pain was already setting his face into a frown and pulling at the skin between his eyes. He would not refuse the offer of a Mandalorian helmet now.

But his days as a crime lord were over. He was back with Sidious now.

Except that Sidious had strange plans for him.

Maul had been swapping back and forth between those thoughts for the last half an hour, while the ship lifted off to parts unknown.

_ Stay? Go? Wait? _

He was tired. He shifted, dragging his mechanical foot back and forth across the floor.

Perhaps Sidious was allowing him to walk relatively free in the ship because Sidious wanted to give an illusion of freedom.

Maul did not know, and after real freedom - years, unpleasant and murky but free, without a master - the idea rankled as much as it comforted.

But it did comfort.

Obi-Wan was still alive. That was the one thing that had not changed through all of Maul's years - he had always been hunting for that man, no matter what mission he mentally put before it. Obi-Wan could throw Maul off any trail he was following, could drag Maul back into the blind hatred that had come close, _so close_, to destroying Obi-Wan.

Maul should not have bothered with killing Satine. The role of warlord had worked for him, and killing Satine was something that Pre Viszla would do and his troops would support. So Maul had played at barbarian Mandalorian, enjoying the waves of horror and grief from Obi-Wan's Force presence even as the nature of his victim mattered little to his choice of fate for her.

Satine had bought Obi-Wan time, though, even if she hadn't known she was doing it.

Maul stood up. More aches made themselves known along his shoulders. He made a mental note of the numbness of his metal limbs, which was not so much a relief as a mark on a checklist.

_My arms will ache tomorrow. My legs will not._

He had gotten used to the balance of the legs the Mandalorians had built for him.

He knocked on the inside of the door of the passenger compartment and received no answer. Darth Sidious would not travel with a crew, but it looked to Maul like the ship had been requisitioned from the Republic in Sidious' role as Chancellor Palpatine. The carpet was yellow and plush, the walls silver, curving, and clean. There were Naboo touches in the design, if Maul recognized them correctly. Sidious had not quite shaken off the aesthetic instincts of his peaceful home planet.

When the door did not open, Maul dug his fingers into the shallow groove of the handle and pulled. The door shushed against the carpet. The second room was, as he had guessed, a larger sitting room: both also had entrances onto the central hallway that lead to the exit ramp. He could barely feel the ship's floor shaking beneath him as the engines underneath did their work.

The ship couldn't have gotten far, being in hyperspace this long. It could not have gotten from Mandalore to Coruscant. Maul would have time to find out what Sidious was doing.

He could not decide whether to take an angry or a subservient mien in front of his master, and it was strange not to simply go with his emotions, to have to make that decision. But his time on Mandalore had taught him the value of a sabaac face, and, before that Lotho Minor had given him years to do all the expressing he had ever wanted. It was time for something a bit more contained now. Something with purpose.

He moved into the hallway and found the doors to the bridge. They opened with a touch. Sidious was sitting just to the right of the canopy, with three short, square droids plugged into other systems. This ship would normally need a larger crew, Maul noticed. Instead, Sidious had brought his mechanical helpers - droids who didn't look like they had a lot of personality. Their memories would be wiped as soon as they got back to Coruscant, he was sure.

Sidious turned to look at him. The old man's hood was raised, his gnarled hands folded inside his sleeves.

"Where are we going, master?"

"Do you know why I haven't shackled you?" Sidious said.

Maul narrowed his eyes. Again there was that sense of decision. He was not used to playing conversations like card games, but he had learned - from Pre Visla, from his time in Cog Hive Seven, that vast sums could be won or lost in the game of words. Maul had viewed disappointing his master as the worst possible transgression, before he head learned. "I had wondered."

"Discard your guesses," Sidious said. "You will be taken to your next mission. you will find out what it is soon enough."

"You have a mission for me?"

Maul could hardly see Sidious's eyes, but he saw the man's expression go crafty. The Force tickled at the back of Maul's mind, warning him of deception.

"I am curious about your time among the Mandalorians," Sidious said. "You nearly killed Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"He was my second priority. I wished to return to you."

"Yes. Well. And you had your brother with you."

"I understand that Savage had worked against you before." There had been a lot that Maul missed while on Lotho Minor, a lot of names like Count Dooku and Asajj Ventress that he did not recognize, but he had pieced together from Savage's opinionated narrative an image of the war that he had been involved in.

Maul nodded. What had happened in the past didn't matter any more.

Sidious looked up. "Ah. There are our visitors now."

Maul did not know what signal Sidious had received. Presumably it was from the Force, not from the ship, because hyperspace was still whipping by outside the canopy. The ship slowed, then, through no apparent effort of Sidious' own. The droids were bringing it in to coordinates that he must have pre-set.

As soon as realspace snapped back into visibility, Maul felt dread in the Force.

There was a ship floating in front of them, far enough away that it would not be washed by the gravitic waves of Sidious's ship's exit from hyperspace but close enough that Maul could see it was large, five stories if it had been a building. The outside was brown, whether from paint or age Maul could not tell, and studded with irregular rivets and yellow-shining windows.

The occupants of that ship were riled and uneasy.

Sidious stood. The droids beeped and blinked, quite possibly bringing the ship into a docking vector with the brown craft. "Come with me, my apprentice," Sidious said.

He glided out of the bridge. Maul looked across the room at the hooded face for a moment. Even with his mechanical legs and Sidious' increasingly wizened stature, the master was still taller than the apprentice.

Something was wrong with the ship they were meeting. Maul could sense it.

He hesitated at the door. Sidious looked back at him, his hood falling from his wrinkled head. Sidious had wisps of white hair and heavy eyebrows. "What do you sense, my apprentice?"

"Fear. Anger."

"Such are the ways of the galaxy."

They proceeded to the door, Sidious was staid, and Maul wary and curious. The two ships docked a few minutes later with a slight clunking sound. It relieved some of Maul's boredom and some of his tension. Whatever happened, would happen. He did not have his lightsaber at his side, which could pose a problem if anyone he faced was heavily armed, but he was confident in his ability to quickly acquire a weapon. If the beings beyond this door were of such authority or such inscrutability that he needed to fight them with something besides a physical weapon, well - time would also tell. He blinked.

The airlocks opened, warning lights changing from angry red to mild yellow and verdant green.

The group of people standing beyond were dressed in mis-matched clothes and armor: a flightsuit here, a vest there, a poncho with a hood over the face of a woman with wrinkled tan skin. A human carrying a blaster rifle in a shoulder holster lead the group. He had a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard, and light blue eyes; he carried himself like a noble but wore oil-stained brown pants and a loose-fitting, equally stained tan shirt. His forearms were armored with metal gauntlets.

"Welcome, gentlemen," Sidious said.

The leader stepped into the ship, looking around at both sides of the hallway as if afraid that something would rush him from just beyond his field of vision. "Hello sir," he said. Even with that tiny sentence he talked with his hands, gesturing in a sort of shrug, perhaps a practiced movement to show off the gauntlets. The jointed green-black armor plates covered his hands to the knuckles, but did not seem to be equipped with any kind of projectile or energy shield. The people behind him shifted, also looking suspiciously at Maul and Sidious. He could not read anything in their Force senses more than the sense of betrayal and anger he had been receiving on the whole mission.

It wasn't that Maul did not want to fight Sidious, but that he was at this point simply curious about what Sidious would do next: Maul had taken all this time to get back to him, and now, he would let Sidious move the next piece in the game, if the rest of his life was going to be a game.

"Go with them," Sidious said.

Maul looked at him. The newcomers shuffled forward, the Force rising more and more nervous around them. The second person in the group was a tall Twi'lek, blue-skinned, the lekku hanging behind his shoulders down his back almost hidden from view under bands of leather, a handband, and a brown cloak.

"This is your mission," Sidious said.

The armed newcomers were looking more and more nervous. The leader glanced at Maul's hands, and Maul thought that he was surprised to see them unbound. "Who are they?" Maul asked, not looking at Sidious.

"They are the next step," Sidious said, and put a hand on Maul's back to push him toward the grimier ship.

The Twi'lek came forward with binders. Maul flinched backward, and felt an abrupt, powerful push from behind him that knocked him off his feet. Only once he was on the floor did he feel the intent behind it - Sidious was trying to get rid of him, and these were his jailers. Maul levered up onto his elbows, the boots of the nearer two beings filling up his field of vision. He started to frame the word "why" and took a breath in instead, projecting his question at Sidious through the Force and saving his breath for the punch the Twi'lek was swinging at him.

Maul caught it on his forearm and reared back to put some distance between him and the second human, who was raising a blaster just like their leader had.

He saw Sidious put a gentle hand on the leader's shoulder. The man flattened his back against the wall.

A twisted streak of Force lightning lanced through the connecting corridor and slammed into Maul. He felt his shoulder collide with the floor of the other ship, uneven rivets digging at and dragging into his skin. Two blaster shots landed on either side of him, striking sparks off of the floor and the wall. Maul heaved himself up again, looking back at Sidious, half furious and half imploring.

"He's yours now," Sidious said quietly to the leader, and Force-pushed that man too.

Maul saw the leader's pale palms coming toward him as the man fell over Maul and rolled, springing to his feet further inside the corridor of his own ship. The Twi'lek and the female human were momentarily shocked. Behind them, the airlock at the edge of Sidious's ship closed. There was no window: Maul could only fear the retracting presence of his master, and that same thrum of betrayal that he had always known was there.

It had been a prophecy, Maul knew now. He growled, baring his teeth. He just hadn't known who was going to fulfill that prophecy.

Either these people were going to kill him or he was going to fight them until the ship broke open and released them all into space.

He thought for a moment of asking his new shipmates who they were. The leader rounded on him, cursing in what Maul thought might be Correllian but still maintaining his stiff, upper-class demeanor. They were confusing, wondering whether the door to the ship had short-circuited, stunned by Sidious's powers. Maul shoved to his feet.

"Get back! Further inside!" The Twi'lek yelled, and Maul realized that the lights on their side of the airlock had just shifted from green to yellow. The leader was inside the ship fully, beyond the second set of doors, but his two underlings were still very close to the ship's skin.

And that change in light meant that Sidious' ship must be undocking.

Maul jumped toward the inner hallway, and slapped the door closed with the Force while he did it. He saw the two crewmembers flinch away from the outer door.

"Stop!" The leader yelled ineffectually.

The crewmembers had figured out rapidly that they were going to be exposed to space in a moment. Sidious's ship had started up: Maul could feel the engines humming.

He turned to the leader, reaching out to choke the man from two feet away. "Where are the escape pods?"

"No way."

Maul squeezed tighter, imagining the ridges of the man's esophagus under his fingers, maybe even his _teeth _if this lasted too long, because those other two were -

The two crewmembers figured out quickly that they had an emergency seal inside the airlock. White gases were just beginning to escape the door seal as Sidious' ship pulled away when the human punched a button that shut the door on their side.

Maul slammed the leader against the wall. "Where?" he tried one more time, and the door to the airlock opened. The two came out guns blazing. One bolt hit Maul, burning what felt like a hole all the way through his right side. He wrenched the blaster out of the human's hand with the Force, smacking the Twi'lek with the gun on the way. The blaster clattered against the wall. There was a cross-corridor just a few steps away, but all Maul knew about the ship was that the escape pods didn't appear to be in this corridor.

(Worries wormed up inside him - even if he got in an escape pod, its very name an implication of relief, would Sidious' ship turn and shoot him down? Sidious did not want him.)

"This was a terrible deal!" The Twi'lek yelled.

"I didn't think - " The leader started, and Darth Maul grabbed him by the throat again.

"Where are we?" Maul asked. "What system?"

He threw the man against the other human, and both of them slumped against the wall. "We're in Hutt Space," the Twi'lek said, his voice shaking.

Maul's lip curled.

"Terrible deal," the leader repeated.

"What was the deal?"

The leader hesitated.

Maul picked up both of them and threw again. They skidded down the corridor, skulls slamming against the floor. He knew in the Force that one was dead and the other dying The Twi'lek lunged at him, raising his heavy blaster high above his shoulder to bring it down toward him like a club.

Maul grabbed his opponent's arm and twisted to the left, breaking the wrist with one of his own hands. The Twi'lek cried out, and Maul hit him in the face with the heel of the other hand, sending him reeling back toward the wall with a broken nose. The urge to kill them roiled in him, but he was reminded too vividly of Hondo's pirates. A gang could be useful. It was almost a pity, that he had learned to work in that way. Killing them would have been much more satisfying, much more quickly.

"Tell me why I was handed over to you," he said, backing the Twi'lek against the wall. Blood started running in dark streams out of his nose.

"This, this is a prison ship!" he said. "He told us you'd be - we thought it was routine!"

Maul narrowed his eyes. This was the second time in his life he had been on a prison ship and he had a lot less reason to stay on this one now. So Sidious had thrown him out again, intending to grind him between the gears of the big machine. The last time, it had been the conflict between Sidious and Plagueis that had required the sacrifice of Maul's time and body. This time, what? Maybe Sidious was simply done with him. This was not his war.

He felt suddenly tired, like weights had been strung from his arms and shoulders.

"What planet?"

The Twi'lek, eyes wide, shook his head in confusion.

"Where is the prison you serve?"

"We're freelancers - Bandomeer! We're going to Bandomeer. This was going to be our last stop."

"And you've dropped out of hyperspace to meet my ship?"

"We're at the planet now. We were just going to meet...whoever your patron was...before we landed..."

"Had he paid you yet?"

"I don't know. Cap - the captain does that..."

Maul recalled what he could of the planet Bandomeer. Cut in half by one large continent and one large sea, it was a mining planet, if he remembered correctly. He had whole libraries of mnemonics with which he had learned about the galaxy, and Bandomeer was mining. He had an inkling that it was dangerous but not inhospitable. He air was breathable, but perhaps it had local infighting, or dangerous animals. It could have been worse. He could have been near Kril'dor or Mustafar.

Maul closed his lips over his teeth. He would play nice, now, to perhaps get this information faster.

"Where are the escape pods?"

The Twi'lek glanced to the left.

As soon as Maul thought that the captain might be sending reinforcements, though, he heard their footsteps ringing on the decking.

Maul reached out, grabbed a hunk of the Twi'lek's headdress on the back of his head, not caring whether it was cloth or skin he held. He held his other arm across his jailer's neck like a bar, hauling him backward. He kicked and struggled and smacked his head into Maul's nose. His vision blurred as pain burst across the bridge of his nose. He rolled his arm up, pressing down on the Twi'lek's throat, and felt him stop moving as he gasped for breath. When four similarly ragtag crew members careened around the corner where the captain had fallen, blasters in hand, Maul pushed the Twi'lek in front of him.

"Don't shoot!" Someone called almost immediately, a human man with blonde braided hair wrapped around his otherwise bald skull.

Maul looked down at him over the top of the Twi'lek's head.

The man got the idea.

Maul walked to the left-hand corridor and saw the escape pod doors there, the thick, ridged clamps around the doors a universal give-away. The message was clear. _Let me go, or I kill him. _He pushed further on the Twi'lek' throat for emphasis. He was more angry than scared: Maul could sense that in the Force. Maybe the Twi'lek would try to break away again. Maybe that would work out in the long run. Sow some confusion among the ranks. Maul had implied that he would make a deal, after all.

The other troops shuffled slowly backward as Maul approached the airlock. He pressed down on the release with the Force, and the door clicked as it opened.

"Don't come after me," he said.

The braided man's brow furrowed, and that as well as the Force warned that he was about to shoot. The Twi'lek wouldn't like that.

Maul was about to move anyway. He pushed the Twi'lek out of the way and backed into the escape pod as the blaster bolt impacted against the wall between them.

Hopefully, when that door closed he wouldn't have to think about these people any more

Hopefully, they wouldn't shoot him down.

More people emerged at the end of the hall. The Twi'lek straightened up and glared both at Maul and the braided man, raising his fisted blue hands in a shaky fighting stance.

Maul snatched the blaster out of the braided man's hand with the Force. As soon as it smacked into his palm he pumped the trigger, firing two bolts into the man's chest and one into the crowd. They returned fire, one bolt burying itself in his shoulder and others burning painlessly into his metal legs as he somersaulted backwards. His legs whirled, acting as a shield. When he landed, he could still walk. He took one step back into the escape pod and punched the release. It would take time for the computer to send the pod flinging out into space, time in which the jailers might rally to stop him. He crouched, tired, wanting to fall backward into the small gray jumpseats on either side of the spherical pod, but he had to be ready for whatever came through that door. The Force was crowded with frustration and malice, and he thought that he should have killed more of them. They seemed so incapable, so disorganized. This wasn't a prison ship: it was a bunch of pirates at best, the only transport Sidious could have found out here.

The ship lurched, and Maul looked at the computer lights behind him. The escape pod was falling away. He took one step to a seat and sat heavily, waiting for what would come next. They could shoot at him if they wanted.

That had, really, been nothing like Cog Hive Seven. It had not lasted as long, for starters, and had not been as difficult.

As revolutionary, maybe. It was just now hitting him that Sidious had truly abandoned him. Fear was his ally but he could take hints even through all of the fear. What now? Even after Lotho Minor he had some direction - find Savage, find Obi-Wan.

He could still find Obi-Wan.

The idea of facing the Jedi, though, just left him tired. Had he grown bored of revenge? The idea sloshed around in his head while the escape pod lights started a landing sequence.


	2. Chapter 2

Darth Maul rubbed at the cloth above his metal knee and sat back, wondering what he was going to do now. The planet below was a mystery, and Maul was, for the first time in a long time, alone. He had wanted to be back in the arena against the Jedi and had now been thrown out of it again. And in another possibility, his brother would be sitting beside him now. He had not loved Savage, but the lost Nightbrother had been a useful ally, toward the end, and someone whom Maul respected. Meeting the Mandalorians and seeing their varying kinds of honor had reinforced his belief that despite their differences and Maul's general disregard for secular codes, Maul and Savage believed in the same kind of honor.

_What would Sidious have done with Savage, if he had lived?_

Of course he would not have. Savage had fought against Sidious, against this new blood Dooku, too much. But Maul felt now like his time with his brother was long ago and far away, that there was a world in which Savage's upbringing had aligned with his, in which both of them would be standing here, exchanging glances and needles of emotion in the Force, waiting for orders.

It was a pity that the younger Zabrak had been so thick-headed. He had been stupid, charging ahead at the wrong moment. Maul had, unfortunately, not been able to teach him how to identify the right moments. Maul had felt clumsy trying to be a master.

Now, he wasn't even a clumsy apprentice any more.

His metal legs had been damaged, but not beyond repair. He fingered three blaster holes in his pants, leading to burnt and flaking metal. The metal legs had been an efficient shield, but it would be too dangerous to use that move in the future. He was not harmless without his ability to walk, but he was effectively incapacitated from fulfilling any of his desires.

Or would have been, if he knew what they were.

The escape pod fell. Maul had never been in one before, but he was sure that there was supposed to be this much shaking: the pod was plummeting through an atmosphere, of course, and clouds jostled even vessels made for them. He could land in an ocean or in a farmer's field. It was all - more shaking, lights still green - up to chance.

He closed his eyes and waited for the Force to rise up to meet him like the ground.

Both did.

The pod shook and shook when it hit the dirt. How it stayed upright he did not know: the pod must have had hydraulics and powered brains that he did not and did not need to understand. Maybe it would aim him toward a population center, and maybe it would not. He gritted his teeth, and despite his best efforts at a meditative attitude opened them as the ship ground to a halt, dirt clattering around him. He was not in the water.

One slow blink later the lights dimmed and the door of the pod lurched open with a loud hydraulic cracking sound. When the smell and taste of grass and rich dirt outside rushed in he realized how stale the air of the escape pod had been. He emerged cautiously.

The smell of grass must have been coming from farther up the slope, because he saw immediately that he was in a wide quarry. He was faced with a gray rock face as tall as his ship _Scimitar_. Black caves opened up into the sloped, rocky bottom of the quarry: from how it looked and from what he knew about this planet, it was clearly a mine. He craned his neck to look around the escape pod and into the other side of the quarry. No one was working here at the moment. There was no machinery left abandoned, although some food wrappers and sundry trash had been washed, presumably during the last rainstorm, into milky puddles of greenish water around the quarry.

The other side had a gentler slope, with a criss-crossing path cut into it for the miners to move up and down. As Maul got closer, tread marks on the dirt seemed to indicate that more droids than organic beings worked these mines. The path was easily accessible, and he started to make his way up.

He still had the blaster he had taken from the captain of the jail ship. He pushed it under his belt, knowing that the makeshift holster would not last if he got in to some serious action, or likely even if he slipped on loose dirt on his way up the switchbacking path. It would have to do for now.

He proceeded slowly, looking at the irregular oval of sky that he could see above the deep quarry. The occasional cloud, heavy but brown with smog, passed overhead through the clear blue sky. It was a contradictory sight, that clean sky and those dirty clouds.

The Force tickled at the back of his head, and Maul stopped, dropping his left hand to his blaster. The metal was cold and smooth, and helped him concentrate as he examined the Force presence that he could sense somewhere nearby. No one was on the path with him, and he could see all the way into the quarry now. That left the caves as a possible source of entry.

It didn't feel like a sentient presence, though. He remembered that Bandomeer was known for dangerous animals.

And he had just landed in the perfect snake pit.

With a scratching, snuffling sound, something burrowed out of the wall next to him. He had time to see a bright green, scaled head and what looked like blue, hexagonal sails before the creature dropped to the pathway and hissed at him. He took one step back, drew the blaster, and fired.

The animal had little chance. He could see that it was a serpentine creature now, thick and short-bodied, with protuberant fangs and four blue sails arranged around its head like puzzle pieces. He could see the purple veins in them, branching. Shot twice in the body, it sank down, its mouth snapping a few times in frenzied attack motions toward him. It could not control the death throes of its body, though, and so the last snap was aimed only at the air as the snake turned belly-up, crushing the sails beneath its own head.

Maul lowered the blaster.

The ground shook. He threw his arms out for support as dirt flew into the air and rocks clattered against each other. Taking one step backward, he Force-jumped to the next switch-back, almost at the top now.

A cavernous-mouthed, bright green snake nose emerged out of the dirt.

This, Maul thought, is why he had mostly seen the tracks of droids.

The bigger snake - mother, father, rival, distant relative of the first? - had blue sails too, all along its back. They flashed and wobbled in the sunlight. The snake's mouth opened, dripping spit or poison, and Maul received an unquestionable Force suggestion that he should dash to his left.

The snake spit up a glob of transparent venom. It hit the path where Maul had been standing and sank into the dirt, turning it black with its wetness.

Maul got off two blaster shots, one which went wide and one which hit the snake just behind its left eye and seemed to burn the skin but not actually faze the animal. Then it spat again, and he dashed back to the place he had stood before. With his metal legs he wouldn't even have to worry if he stepped in acid.

(He would have to stop using them as shields some time...)

He fired again, this time hitting one of the blue sails and striking the snake inside its mouth. It had been mid-spit, and the blaster shot knocked a tooth sideways. The venom leaked down the side of the snake's jaw as it fought with whatever numbness or pain was filling its mouth. The third shot blackened one eye.

Now the creature was furious. It coiled its body, waves of muscle seeming to roll up and down the length of it. Its tail was still somewhere in the ground. Maul could see pebbles jump as that latter half of the body created tiny groundquakes further down the path with its thrashing. He wished he had his lightsaber: it would be so easy just to cleave the thing's skull in two.

Instead he had to dodge as the mouth opened wide, umbrellaing wider than he thought it could, and the green maw filled with red tongue and white stalagmite teeth plummeted toward him. When it landed it just bumped the ground and then sniffed, the blind eye not moving, the other one surely rolling around looking for its prey. Maul wanted to get closer, wanted to rip those delicate looking blue scales right out of the muscle of its back, but he knew that the blaster was much more efficient and could get the job done: he sprayed laster blasts from the thing's mouth to its eye and back. It had been, and was still, silent except for the sniffling of its gigantic nostrils, but he could feel its cries of pain in the Force. With sudden violence, a spasmic type of movement completely different from its blind snuffling of the rocks, it reared upward. Maul saw a section of the bottom of its tail breach the wall further down, spilling another section of the switchback path into the bottom of the quarry.

It retreated, sinking back toward the quarry but unable to return to the hole from whence it had come. The wounded eye caused it too much pain to burrow. Maul wondered how long it would be until the creature could move underground again. The miner droids might have a surprise waiting for them tomorrow.

He shook his head, sighed, and looked at the ammo count on his blaster. He had thirty shots left. That would be enough for a bar brawl, but not enough for a Jedi. And he was beginning to hate this weapon. It was so useless next to a lightsaber.

Maul hunched his shoulders and crested the rise.

He emerged into a cleared plain of rocky ground. Behind him, he could see other quarries, and canyon-lands of mines that had been carved into Bandomeer's surface. The natural lay of the ground looked flat. Perhaps there were mountains somewhere else, but here, the miners had had to create their own topography.

The next lot over was a field, in the grass on the edge of land tilled for crops. It felt like high summer, the heat not quite oppressive but fierce enough that he rolled the sleeves of his tunic up, first right and then left. Although at first glance the field had seemed verdant, he could see now that he examined it more closely that the tall crops were withered and small, the stems and leaves the brittle yellow of parchment when they should probably have been green. Smoke or smog filled up the sky to one side, blocking out half of the sun and probably only increasing the heat. The escape pod had ripped a wide path into the dirt, exposing the bedrock, but right in front of him there was a paved road, one that he hoped would lead him to a city with a spaceport.

After a few steps he turned, looking back down at the white escape pod with its blue cushion deflating behind it like spilled guts. Would it be better to destroy it, so that the jailers would not come looking for him? Would they even bother? More importantly, if Sidious did, the Sith Lord would be able to track his wayward apprentice easily through the Force whether or not the escape pod remained in its ruined state. The idea of crawling back down into the pit made his lip curl. Maul left the escape pod behind.

The first sign that Maul was nearing a city was the dirt and wreckage along the side of the road: a speeder bumper here, a spilled and torn trash bag there, the road becoming wider and more clearly marked even as the edges became more broken up, and Maul started having to step over chunks of tarmac in the dirt. There were no slidewalks, and not even concrete walkways. He passed a few people, pale aliens with hair of a bright gold that seemed to stand out like a sore thumb on their brown planet. They looked haggard, but also looked up at him as he approached. It said something about a place if the natives were willing to meet strangers' eyes.

Some of them raised their hands and said hello, but he did not answer. He wished that his tunic had a hood he could raise, but he had not prioritized gaining the uniform of the Sith when he had been on Mandalore. He nodded at the occasional Meerian passerby who looked like they might look at him twice. They always decided against it after catching his eyes.

Maul noticed quickly that he had been lucky to land where he did. The farm was a rarity, and clearly struggling to survive. If the escape pod had landed one hundred meters to the left or right, it would have fallen into even deeper pits or mines, perhaps occupied by even nastier creatures.

The Bandomeer town he came across a few miles down the roadway was large, but it squatted alone in the farmland around it. Buildings the beat-up brown color of the dirt sat hunched over the streets crowded with speeders. Maul quickly noticed a variety of cantinas. A popular chain of diners seemed to have taken the green snake creature as its logo. If there was a spaceport, it was clearly not on this side of the city.

There should be an information kiosk, somewhere. He shouldered through an unusually thick crowd of passerby, only to find them watching a video of a newscaster talking about mining operations. In contrast to the demographics of the beings he had seen on the road, this crowd was mostly human, with the brightly-colored head of hair of a Meerian showing here and there between the humans as its owner craned his or her neck to see over the taller beings.

The mining video didn't contain anything that had much relevance to him, Maul thought. He felt some recognition, though, some deja vu, and peered more closely at the images of lifter droids conveying black rocks up into red-hot smelting chambers. The newscaster superimposed in 2-D over the grainy image was a blonde-haired Cathar woman. Nothing about her slitted eyes or short, striped fur was familiar.

The name of the planet was, though. Maul peered at the Aurebesh text at the bottom of the screen. _Orsis. _He had trained there, at an academy for mercenaries, when he was very young -

The crowd had molded comfortably around him now. Enough pedestrians had stopped that only the people on the outside of the groups were getting glares from those who hadn't. There was in fact less arguing than Maul would have expected, but then, he was used to hurried, crowded Coruscant.

He chose a person standing next to him, a tall human woman who didn't look like she would startle. Maul caught the woman's eyes and then looked toward the screen. "What's happening?"

"InterGalactic Ore is moving some operations to Orsis. Karking great for them, but might not go so kriffing well for us."

"Huh," Maul said.

_Orsis._

"I need to get to the spaceport."

The woman looked quizzically at him, and Maul wondered whether she would answer the unspoken question. Maybe she would be too caught up in whatever economic ramifications the InterGalactic Ore news was going to have on her.

"It's on the other kriffing side of town." The woman didn't sound perturbed. "Take this road to Kalor Street."

Maul nodded and left her.

Getting out of the crowd was time-consuming, but beyond that, the walk was easy. Maul's mechanical legs were functioning acceptably, only occasionally listing, and his blaster didn't draw any suspicion. Many people here, of varying species and genders, carried either similar weapons or heavy axes and hammers probably used in mining.

Where was he going?

Down this sidewalk, sure. One foot in front of the other, looking straight ahead instead of at the crowds on either side. There, a girl smoking a death stick. There, that green snake logo above a diner on a corner. There, a driver honking at a traffic light as someone else in a small, beat-up speeder cut him off. Maul wanted a mission. He itched for one, and the mentions of InterGalactic or and Orsis, both entities with which he had tangled before, didn't help. How did people live like this? He was hungry too, and since he had been living off of Death Watch hospitality and the credits stashed in his and Savage's stolen ship, the easiest way to procure food would be to steal it. That was bound to have complications, though, if he was loud and someone caught him.

He had trained on Orsis. He had had friends there, before Sidious had taught him that he was destined to only leave them behind.

He hadn't left Savage behind, though, not really.

The spaceport was small. He saw the domed landing pads peeking out from behind the other buildings of the city - he still did not know its name - before he was sure he was on the right road. The turn off to the spaceport was clear. He hesitated outside one of the diners with the snake logo before opening the door.

The smell of the food was mouth-watering. Something was frying on a grill. The diner was clean and brightly lit, with only a few humans and a few Ithorians occupying the spindly tables. The girl behind the counter was a Meerian, with silvery hair and wearing a baggy shirt under an equally baggy apron.

He picked up a menu off of the counter. In small text on the back, it explained that the chain's logo was the sun snake because it exemplified beauty, grace, and, in myth, had warmed lost travelers with the heat that it absorbed through the sails on its back.

It didn't seem likely that he would find spacers here.

He shoved the front door open just in time to see the woman he had talked to in front of the news broadcast walking toward the spaceport. She had dark skin and black hair fading to gray. Her chin and neck were wrinkled with weight and age, but she didn't look elderly - probably fifty. She wore a blue flightsuit with black trappings, and didn't appear to be carrying a weapon or expressing anything besides slightly grumpy acknowledgement of the world around her.

The human did not glance back when Maul fell into step behind her. Maul reached out to tap her on the shoulder, but did not want to frighten her - he had no idea what this woman _was_, but it was possible that she had a spaceship. It was also possible that she was a provincial miner who had never been off world, but Maul didn't know.

The woman ignored him. Maul quickened his pace and looked her in the eyes when he got a chance. What was he supposed to say here? 'Hey you?' 'Excuse me?' This person was not a Force-user. She only deserved a certain measure of formality and respect.

Luckily, the woman made the first comment. "Are you kriffing following me?"

"I am looking for the space port."

"Yeah, you told me. And I told you." She shrugged.

_I'm hungry, _Maul thought, but he wasn't going to say that. "Do you have a ship?"

"Who are you?" The woman stopped, leaving Maul backed against the wall of the chain diner.

Maul spread his hands. He was not good at supplication, but he had a feeling that she wouldn't like to learn, suddenly, that she was talking to a Sith Lord or a mercenary. "I'm a freelancer. I landed on this planet without anything, and need to leave it."

She looked at him suspiciously. Maul rankled: he hated asking for help. Maybe he could just threaten her. That would work better.

"A freelance _what?"_

_ Bounty hunter, assassin, psychic, _Maul thought. _I could slam her against the wall and force her to take me to her ship. But there are police in this city, there are crowds and crowds of miners, and -_

His stomach growled.

Some of the suspicion faded from the woman's eyes.

"I need to get to Orsis," Maul said. "One planet. One stop."

Her eyes narrowed again. She looked back and forth along the street for help. "Do you want some caf or something?"

Maul nodded.

They went back into the store with the snake logo. The woman ordered him a caf and a sandwich thick with meat, bread, and beans.

"It's hard to grow anything above the kriffing ground here. And as soon as you start, they kriffing dig the ground out from under you." She sat down with a smaller sandwich in her hand.

She talked nearly non-stop.

Her name was Kasen. Maul had not yet determined whether she was a spacer or not, but miner seemed more likely from the way she talked. Maybe she was an out-of-work miner, her job taken by the droids. That would explain the anger. She talked like she was planning on wearing her lungs out before the rock dust could eat them.

"The Republic won't help, the Hutts won't help, and it's not their kriffing fault - what InterGalactic Ore gives, InterGalactic takes away, you know? It's not like we didn't love their kriffing mining droids before they started taking over every inch of the place and practically driving us into the ocean. One chancellor is just like another one out here, mate. And Governess Rava just sits in her kriffing palace and eats up her family's money like her father and his father have done since the planet kriffing formed out of the primordial dirt."

"You are a miner?"

"Yeah. I came here to make my fortune. You ever notice how no one ever says that in the present tense? Ah yes, here I am making my fortune _right now. _No one says that. You know why not? Because they don't _talk _to the people who never made it."

Maul said, "Do or do you not have a ship?"

She moved her sandwich around in her mouth and swallowed dramatically. "What did you say you do again?"

_So she's hiding something, just like I am. Or is only willing to take information like an eye for an eye. _

Maul still hadn't seen any weapons on her, which probably meant that she didn't have any. There wasn't even a bulge in her boot.

"I am a mercenary."

"I had a feeling so." Kasen chewed. "I have a ship."

Maul wanted to lurch forward, wanted to grab her by her lapels and order her to grant him command of her ship. He almost did. The table rattled. Even after all the abuse he had put them through, his mechanical legs still worked naturally.

Kasen must have seen the anger in his face, because she leaned back slightly, not fearful so much as suddenly quizzical about why Maul was so passionate about getting off the planet. A mercenary might see this as just another opportunity, he thought. A mercenary might be laissez-faire, might take it as a chance to make friends.

Maul could only act for so long before he got tired of pretending.

"I'll take you one way," Kasen said. "But you have to do something for me in return."

"What?" Maul tipped his head.

"I don't know," Kasen said. "Clean the hyperdrive, do the kriffing dishes or something. We'll work it out on the way."

Maul nodded.


	3. Chapter 3

Maul saw the likely cause of Kasen's charity as soon as he walked onto the small ship. It was a freighter, cross-shaped, with the bridge before and the ramp behind, living facilities on one side and storage on the other. It was remarkably plain. Like nearly everything else that Maul had seen since the sides of the jail ship came into view, it was dull brown in color.

The inside, though, was a chaos of red and blue decorations that appeared to have a religious significance. A tapestry of a six-armed, dragon-headed goddess was hung on one wall above a rickety table holding candles and beads set on top of a thin, gold-flecked, dark green cloth.

Kasen just glanced at it as Maul walked in. "You'll be bunking in the living room. The couch has seen better days, but, I gather so have you."

Maul felt like he should be putting a bag down, but he had nothing. He also felt like he should be killing this woman, attacking her and taking her ship the instant the launch codes had been typed in - but why? Maul was so used to secrecy because Sidious' life was secret. Maul's did not have to be. He had gained a certain measure of notoriety among the Mandalorians and the Death Watch, but that conflict, as massive in scope as it had seemed to Obi-Wan Kenobi and the others involved, had been tiny on the galactic scale and only affected a certain demographic of people. Maul knew that the galaxy at large confused Death Watch with Mandalorians or the other way around and probably couldn't name anything about either except that they had once, and perhaps did not any more, wear functional armor.

Kasen was not a liability because there was no one for her to tell anything _to. _Sidious clearly did not care whether Maul lived or died. Maul wouldn't have been entirely surprised or unsatisfied if Sidious, in the tradition of the Sith, had wanted his once-apprentice dead, but the Sith Lord had shown his apathy to be even greater than that on the jail ship. Sidious truly didn't differentiate, or he would have killed Maul himself instead of tossing him into a situation that was as likely to end in chaos and death on the jail ship than in Maul's immediate demise.

What a gulfing apathy that would be. All that Sith power and planning. Sidious planned _everything. _There had never been any room in that dejarik-master brain to _not _care about something.

Until now.

That fact worried Maul more and more as he stopped pushing back at it, as he looked into the empty space between two of the dragon goddess's upraised arms.

"Have you heard of Ralima?" Kasen said.

Maul shook his head.

"Kriffing good goddess she is. Doesn't outlaw anything that isn't wrong. She doesn't have her eye turned to one kriffing mining planet right now though." She sighed.

"She doesn't mind you swearing, does she?"

Kasen laughed in a short burst. "I'm not karking taking _her_ name in vain. Those other words belong to somebody else."

Maul nodded. "I see."

"Settle down. The bridge isn't big enough for two. Put the transceiver on if you want. There's probably somebody screaming about InterGalactic Ore that has some interesting analysis." She turned away to head to the bridge. The small door leading in that direction was draped with rust-red beads that looked like the same kind as on the alter.

"You said you wanted me to do something for you in return."

Kasen stopped, turned half way away. "Yeah. I'll figure it out. It takes, what, two days to get to Orsis?" She let the silence linger for just two heartbeats before giving a stronger indication that she wanted actual feedback from Maul. She, Maul realized, assumed that the Zabrak knew where he was going. "What?"

"Two days," Maul parroted. That sounded right.

He would need to kill _something _after this. The lack of direction was beginning to infect him. Soon his thoughts would get fuzzy and all he would be able to _do _was parrot.

Until he had a mission again. Whether that mission lasted for months or weeks or the time it took to fight a wild beast away from his throat didn't matter.

"I'll figure it out," Kasen said.

As it turned out, Kasen did figure it out. She had not been exaggerating about putting her passenger to work washing the dishes: her food processor, she said, had broken a long time ago, so the galley was primitive. She had a sonic scrubber but no dish washer, so Maul hosed down the dirtied dishes after the five fully-home-made meals they had together. The trip did indeed take two days. Kasen's eating schedule was almost like clockwork, except that on the second day she slept in, seemingly having over the one night previous gained the confidence to believe that her guest would not murder her in her sleep.

Kasen prayed once a day, in the evening, casually pushing the rickety alter aside (it looked like it had been set up on a sabacc table that had not been intended for use on a spaceship - most of her furniture was, unusually, not bolted down - ) and opening a drawer at the base of the Ralima statue. From the drawer she took a small, dedicated datapad and meditated on the text within. The meditations were short, lasting no more than a few seconds. Maul was still curling his lip at them by the time the ship began orbiting Orsis.

Throughout the trip, Kasen talked almost constantly, but said remarkably little about her own past. She said in passing that she had a sister, and also referred to going home to see her family for a week-long holiday that Maul had never heard mentioned before. Other than that, her conversations were mostly about the Orsis-Bandomeer situation and how it affected InterGalactic Ore's various other holdings and her own business.

The ship didn't appear to have any mining equipment on it, or space for such. The engines rumbled nearby as Maul slept on the couch just to the side of the statue of Ralima, and the section where Kasen slept was, if Maul's assessment of the ship's size from the outside had been correct, a space hardly larger than a couch itself, located on the opposite side of the kitchen.

During the days Kasen listened to the transmissions she had talked about, although in hyperspace she had to make do with recorded ones that would be a day or two out of date now. She seemed to live, breathe, and eat the _idea _of mining without actually doing any. Nor was it an academic interest: Kasen was more likely to rattle off a list of types of ore and what machines were used to dig them up than to talk about the socio-political factors among the people and businesses that used Bandomeer's soil. Kasen thought about the planet before the people, but not in an environmentalist way. She had the mind of someone who worked with her hands, not a pundit.

On the other hand, she didn't seem to be affiliated with any company or to have a job that she found worth talking about. She didn't even complain about her circumstances specifically, although once Maul found her muttering about what it cost to put fuel in the tanks. Maybe Ralima was one of those deities that encouraged helping others at the expense of oneself.

Kasen hadn't seemed to notice that Maul had mechanical limbs, or if so, hadn't mentioned it. It wasn't an unusual thing to have prosthetic legs, not even two, especially among a society in which a lot of people worked for industries involving human interaction with large, dangerous, low-tech machinery. The fact that the prosthetic extended up past Maul's hips was unusual, but Kasen never found herself in a circumstance where she would notice that.

Maul finally brought Kasen's occupation up as a conversation topic one day when the human was sitting a pillow she had taken from the couch, sipping from a cup of caf on the evening of the first day.

Maul was sitting on the couch. He had stayed there for most of the trip, sometimes meditating and sometimes also listening to the transmissions that so entertained Kasen, pretending that he understood more than he did and learning what he could.

"It doesn't look like you could _mine _much using this ship," Maul said.

"I used to be a miner," Kasen replied. "Back then I had a bigger ship. But I sold it. I kriffing told you, ExtraGalactic Ore bought out all the little guys."

She hadn't told him that in such precise terms, but Maul nodded.

"I'm between jobs now. I pick up freelance things here and there but everything's either taken by droids or somebody's nephew or InterGalactic's crack team of Being Resources barves. They've got excluding honest workers down to a science."

"Do you have a family?"

"My daughter is in school on Alderaan. My son lives with his father."

The intricacies of divorce were of profound disinterest to Maul; he had simply wanted to know exactly how desperate Kasen was. Not desperate enough to not go out of her way for a lost traveller, apparently, maybe because she only had one mouth to feed most of the time.

There was a silence that could have been interpreted as awkward if either one of them had shown more interest in continuing the discussion. Kasen did, but with an air of boredom. "What about you? Family?"

Maul shook his head.

"And..."

Maul shrugged.

Kasen narrowed her eyes again. She was suspicious of Maul's label as 'mercenary,' he knew.

However, she had let Maul carry a blaster into his ship. Maul had barely thought about that until he was lying awake, sensing that Kasen was asleep in the other room, and he had put the blaster under the alter to the goddess just to have somewhere to set it that wasn't out in the crowded open. Kasen didn't seem to have a weapon. Maybe she couldn't afford one.

They still had this cordial standoffishness between them when Kasen brought the ship out of hyperspace and into a low orbit around the planet Orsis. The surface of the planet had more varied shapes and colors than Maul had expected, although he remembered such varied areas as jungles, lava plains, and ocean shores from during his time training there. The planet had scattered continents, with the largest showing a blob of green forest next to a similar-sized blob of brown desert.

"Where exactly to you want to go on this kriffing lump of dirt?" Kasen said. She had been looking around nervously at the stars, and as Maul edged into the crowded bridge he saw why. Just over Kasen's left shoulder he saw a two-dimensional screen showing what other ships were in the area, and four large vehicles were labeled with the words "InterGalactic Ore." It was funny, Maul thought, that he was going to have another run-in with them. He did not doubt that Kasen would find some way to get him in trouble with the mining company before the day was through - that was how missions tended to go whenever Maul deigned to get another person involved. He would know all about this planet in a matter of days.

Every time he blinked it was as if he switched between looking at Orsis with adult eyes and looking at it with child's eyes.

Maul did not have any great fondness for the Orsis Academy, but he had done a lot of learning and a lot of growing up there. It had been one of the first places, too, in which he had actively taken part in Sidious' practice of wiping any trace of Maul's presence in the galaxy out of existence. The galaxy was a big place if someone really wanted to hide, but it was remarkable how many people who wanted to hide frequented the common stomping grounds for criminals, like Nal Hutta or Coruscant.

Instead of taking risks and potentially getting the highly communicative galactic criminal underworld talking, Sidious had simply ordered Maul to kill everyone in the Academy.

So that was what he had done.

"There are the ruins of a training academy on the shore of the eastern sea." Maul pointed, nearly shoving Kasen's shoulder in the process. "You will see a perimeter fence, if it is still standing."

"How long ago were you here?"

"A long time."

Kasen scoffed.

"Perhaps ten years."

Was is that long? That short? Maul had committed to memory what year it was, but when he thought back and tried to trace what he had experienced in those intervening years, Lotho Minor still got in the way.

It didn't matter. Kasen wouldn't know enough to correct him. Maybe the fallen walls of the academy would correct them both. How much overgrowth could grow in ten years?

"Whatever. Did you just kriffing point at the planet and tell me to land there? I need coordinates. We've gotta go through kriffing clouds and drek."

Maul sighed, but very quietly.

Kasen didn't seem to notice. Instead she changed the small 2-D screen to a more complex map of the planet. She pressed buttons, swiping through different views until she found one that showed the numbers pinpointing what she thought might be the right location. "Look, barve, if we come down right here we can go along the coast until you see your kriffing perimeter fence. You sure you don't want go to a city, or something? Some nice diner?"

"Yes."

"Do you expect me to wait for you here?"

"No."

Maul was not actually sure how he expected to get off Orsis, but it didn't matter. He could survive a good long time in this woods. He knew. He had done it as a teenager.

And there was something he needed to find here. The fact that he didn't know what it was exactly may or may not have meant that it didn't want to be found.

Without any other mission, he had all the time in the world.

"Take me to the place I pointed out."

"I'm not sure you've washed enough dishes for this, barve."

Maul did not reply to that. The bridge was small and cramped, so he left.

A few minutes later, Kasen yelled for him to come back and look out of the viewport. The ship had broken the cloud layer and was soaring over a beach on a blue-sky day. The jungle on the other side of the narrow, sandy shore was tangled and deep, the plants mostly a dark green with the occasional purple or orange flower poking up like a gaudy neon advertisement. "Does this look karking familiar enough for you?" Kasen said.

"Not yet," Maul said.

Kasen almost repeated the words. Maul saw her rolling them around in her cheeks.

Maul was beginning to become unhappy with Kasen's impatience. The Zabrak leaked anger into the Force, but it was no good: Kasen could not feel it. There would be no satisfaction there. Again, Maul considered killing the woman and taking her ship. But part of him did not want it to be easy for him to leave Orsis. He had to do something here. It was something best done once he was out from under the staring eyes of the many-armed goddess. Let Kasen go back to her mundane life, to the bills she paid and the out-of-work miners whose company she was probably more accustomed to hosting.

He saw a conning tower rising up out of the jungle and almost slammed his hand into Kasen's shoulder. He only stopped himself because her hand was on the yoke. "There," Maul growled.

Kasen didn't hesitate to reply. "I'm gonna have to put down on the beach, because I don't exactly see a landing pad around here."

"There were."

The landing pads, Maul knew, were actually one of the more intact parts of the academy when last he left it. Sidious had picked him up there.

Kasen's ship had by this time passed the conning tower. The human brought them in over the jungle for a view of the place. It looked overgrown in parts, and the outline of the wall was barely visible over all the plants that had climbed over it, using it to hoist themselves closer to the large, yellow sun. There were signs of recent habitation, too, and as soon as Maul saw them he knew that his idea of a mediative visit focused on his past (was that what he was here to do? was he looking backward?) would not come easy. There were two pre-fab buildings and a machine almost as large as them, with a scoop on one side and a drill on the other. In a clearing between the prefab buildings, Maul could also see small, silver metallic shapes that could either be droids or simply accumulated supplies or piles of trash. Someone was scouting out the site.

"Blast it. Someone's already here." Kasen sounded surprisingly level as she brought the ship back around to the beach. "They've probably seen us."

"If they have scanners," Maul cautioned her.

"They could just kriffing look up. They probably heard the engines. I thought you said this place was deserted."

"Put down on the beach."

"I bet those are InterGalactic Ore guys scouting this out as a place to put a mine."

"I said that you didn't have to have anything to do with my..." Maul hesitated. His mission? His what? "...time here."

Kasen swore again, this time harsher. "Yeah. And hey, I can confirm that karking news report."

"Land."

"Don't get so huffy about it."

Maul nearly growled at her.

As the ship hovered over the beach, Maul began to sense some hesitation. He had drifted back into the corridor from the living quarters to the bridge, but now stomped back. Kasen told him what was wrong before he asked.

"I don't think I can do it."

Maul tipped his head. "Do what."

"The landing. The sand is too...sandy."

It would be so easy for Maul to just raise his fist and hit her. Kasen had probably seen something to that effect in Maul's expression, because she aimed the ship back out at the waves and looked back at her passenger. "Look, this ship has narrow little legs." She gestured with her hands for emphasis. "It's good for landing on landing pads, tarmac surfaces. I could even do crowded city streets. My old ship, now that had special legs for landing on rocky surfaces. Such as mines." She was clearly talking to Maul as if the Zabrak was a child, and hamming it up too. "But I can't _afford _that any more. We have to put down on the landing pad or else I'll sink in and flop over and fall into the sea."

Seemingly affronted by her own dramatic telling, Kasen sat back in her seat from where she had been leaning and gesturing dramatically.

"You said you could do this," Maul said.

"I thought you were going to a _city!_ Like a...kriffing...city person."

"Then set down on the landing pad."

_It will be harder for you to leave than for me, now, _Maul thought.

"I don't know, bro. What am I going to tell them? 'Yeah I'm just dropping this barve off, he doesn't know where he's going and didn't tell me, I just work here?' Except," she added as an aside, "I don't because you took all the jobs."

"I'll jump down. Open the ramp."

"Are you sure?" Kasen said flatly. "Also, that is not going to be much more subtle."

"Do it."

"They might see me. There are security forces out here, even if we can't see them - "

The endless circling had finally gotten to Maul. His fondness for Kasen was wearing off. "Do it!" He gripped her shoulder, and leaned down. "Would you rather I _crash_ the ship?"

"What?"

Maul grabbed Kasen's neck, pressing against her jugular with his forearm. "Open the ramp."

"It's there...it's there." She struggled, pointing toward a lever on the other side of the cockpit. It would have been easy for her to reach over if Maul wasn't keeping her pinned to the chair from behind.

Maul had a momentary flash of vision: not precognition, although maybe a tinge of the Force warning him of betrayal. He simply imagined what might happen if he let Kasen go. Kasen might move toward the lever and then push back, attacking, wasting precious time -

And part of Maul wanted to let her.

"Are you kriffing serious? You'll die if you jump out -" Kasen said.

But it was so much faster for Maul to just flip the switch with the Force. He heard the _chunk _of metal separating from metal behind him, beyond the room where he had slept, and red lights sprouted up all over the console as the ramp lowered into thin air too fast for the pressure inside and outside the ship to stabilize. He heard more crashing sounds as things inside the living area - maybe the alter - fell over.

Maul said, "Good."

He released Kasen's neck.

As soon as he did, she turned around, livid. Maul backed the few steps out of the bridge, waiting to see if Kasen would do anything. The most foolish move she could make would be to close the ramp.

"Kark it, get out, you crazy barve," Kasen said. "See if I care if you break your neck."

Maul stomped across the living room, securing his blaster more tightly to his waistband as he went. "You're a terrible dishwasher anyway!" Kasen yelled from behind him.

A moment later, as Maul reached the ramp and the wind started swirling around him from the speed and the engines, Kasen started to follow him. Maul heard the footsteps, sensed the woman's fear. She was too nice, Kasen was. She worried too much. Maybe she wasn't corrupt enough to be a Bandomeer miner.

"Listen, I'd rather land than you kriffing threaten to kill yourself - wait! The kriff did I get myself into?"

The ship was over the ocean. Orsis was a prettier planet than Bandomeer, at least right now: the sun, slightly larger than Bandomeer's but the same yellow color, was shining over the calm, blue ocean. The ship was on a straight course perhaps one hundred feet from the beach, probably not out past the continental shelf.

Maul stomped down the ramp and launched himself into the air, gathering the Force around him as he did.

Air rushed around him. It was disorienting that the blue horizon didn't appear to be moving, but then the sound of Kasen's ship's engines rushed past him. A few seconds later Maul could sense the surface of the water. He curved the surface of the sea like it was a bowl, the waves frothing white at the tops.

He wished that he could just fly over the surface. For a moment, he tried. But that was not one of the capabilities of the Force. Instead he dropped gently into the ocean just as the rounded top of a newly forming wave was lifting up the entire bowl of water, which propelled him another tiny distance toward the shore. The water was cold, and the salt stung his eyes where it splashed from both his landing and the natural waves. He started to kick toward shore.

Kasen's ship trawled across the sky overhead. The fact that it was already moving probably meant that Kasen had gone back to the bridge. She would see Maul swimming, would see him climb up on shore if she waited long enough. Then she could leave Maul alone.

The Zabrak was halfway to the beach, soaked through, when he realized how much he was struggling against the weight of his legs. He had buoyed himself up with the Force for some time, but then had naturally relaxed it: and now he felt himself starting to sink toward the sea floor. It was only about twenty feet down now, what should have been a simple swim, but his legs were nearly solid metal.

This would not be a rightful place to die.

Maul growled, but he was weakening, and water sloshed up against his face. He took a deep breath, wondered if he could move the water around him with the Force. He tried, but it was under too much pressure and not solid enough for him to get the mental equivalent of a grip on the particles that comprised it.

The water covered his mouth, filling it with the taste of brine and fish. This, Maul thought, had been a terrible idea.


	4. Chapter 4

Kasen was telling him how terrible an idea it had been when he woke up.

"You _idiot._ Did you see what just happened there? We had to fish you out of the ocean with a _magnet. _An InterGalactic Ore Combine Ore-Tex 785 Magnetic Crane. That costs _money."_

The idea that Kasen had said 'we' floated through Maul's groggy brain even before he got surprised that the miner was still around. There were other people in the room, three of them, wearing overalls and goggles. He groaned.

"What do you remember?" said an old woman's voice. When Maul focused, he could see that one of the people wearing goggles was an elderly, orange-skinned Nikto. She held herself authoritatively, with squared shoulders and a level gaze, and judging by her age and the yellow badge on her coverall, she probably was.

Maul sat up before he bothered answering her.

"I left you. I fell into the sea."

_More importantly, I came to Orsis to find my past._

Nearly drowning had knocked that certainty into him. He was here because he needed to find something, or learn something, or resolve something. The fact that he didn't know what it was or whether it was a physical or mental thing frightened him, but he was used to fear. He could swim in fear more easily than he could swim in the ocean.

He remembered drowning.

The water had still been blue, the sun filtering far, far down, so that he had been able to see the bubbles kicked up by his arms as he flailed, clawing at the expanse of water as he tried to get back to the surface. He could kick his legs, but they seemed to get heavier and heavier as the metal pieces kept dragging him down. It had taken far too long. For a few minutes, he had been able to sustain his blood-oxygen count simply by slowing his heart rate and brain, falling into something that was half meditation and half unconsciousness, swirling the Force around at the edge of his through just so that he remembered it was there when he began to forget everything else. His lungs tensed up, painfully spasmed, and seized.

Drowning had been worse than being rebuilt by the Nightsisters.

But, then as now, he had been resurrected.

"We've treated you for lack of oxygen," the Nikto woman said. "You're lucky your friend came back for you."

Maul glanced at Kasen without moving his head.

"Are you a Jedi or something?" Kasen said, sounding shocked. "The way you moved that water..."

The Nikto looked between them, waiting for some kind of response. Maul didn't want to give one until he knew what exactly Kasen had told her about their arrival.

He recognized the logos on the miners' coveralls now too: InterGalactic Ore. Kasen had set down a nest of her enemies - or at least a nest of people she resented - when she had seen that Maul had sank into the sea and not come back up.

Maul sighed and sat up. He still felt groggy and weak. He had been relying on other people far too much lately, though. When he stood, his legs were steady. Some of the miners moved back on limbs that looked shakier than his.

'I have come here to visit this site," Maul said. "Do not obstruct my plan."

The Nikto was taken aback. "Your friend said you were pretty single-minded about getting here. Can you tell me why?"

Maul flashed her a disdainful look.

"This is a preparatory outpost. We don't do any mining. But you're liable to fall down a hole or be eaten by something."

Maul didn't even shrug. The two miners let him pass them, out into a short white hallway in a prefab building that probably served as the InterGalactic agents' medical center. Behind him, though, he heard the Nikto and Kasen arguing.

Maul kept going.

Outside, he saw Kasen's ship on a small round landing pad, and short cleared paths between the prefab buildings. The landing pad was the only paved area. The metal chunks he had seen from the sky were indeed droids, one of them inactive now and one of them seemingly slowly sniffing the ground with a round metal detector pad.

His legs did not seem to be compromised by their stint in the water. He snarled at himself, wishing for one of the first times that he still had his organic legs. It was funny how he had more to worry about than the fact that parts of his body had been replaced.

The water had done something to his lungs too: his breathing felt shallow, but not debilitating. He walked into the jungle, brushing wide-leaved plants away and reaching out with the Force to sense any predators before they arrived. The voices he could hear behind him prickled just like they did in the Force. Would Kasen leave? Maul would have to deal with that later.

His fists curled almost automatically. He hadn't had a straight fight in too long.

Very soon, even the jungle didn't fight back any more. Leaves with sharp edges smacked him and let off exotic, cloying smells when their edges split. The ground was rocky, and trip-wired with thick vines and knee-high clumps of grass that were almost solid. Maul raised his arms like he was going to box someone. The jungle ended soon, though, spitting him out onto a gentle slope of black dirt that lead to a severe cliff at the edge of the ocean.

His boots crunched on the dirt, the tiny brown-black rocks at the edge of the slope down to the sea. This could have been the same place where he went swimming with Kilindi Motoko, or where the instructors took a whole group of trainees out past the continental shelf and told them about how to face their fears. (Perspective, that was the answer. Look at how big the sea is, how much of it is going about its own business as opposed to furthering your problem. Perspective and lots and lots of kicking.)

He knew that it was really a completely different section of coast, though, perhaps not even connected geographically. It could be a different sea. Maul did not know. He hadn't known how to fly spaceships when he went to the Orsis training facility as a teenager. He had known how to drive speeders, and how to read space navigational charts, but had not yet put the two skills together.

Kilindi Motoko. The name brought up a host of sense-memories: the smell of the dirt outside the trainees' barracks, perhaps the same pushed up from the sea next to him; the rusty color of her tunic, the faces of his other friends.

Their blood, too, the whites of their eyes when he killed them, but those scenes were associated with smells as of fire, and now he was by the sea.

Why did the jungle not grow at this outcropping, he wondered? He kicked at the surface of the dirt with his toe and felt bedrock underneath. Small chips of dirt fell away, revealing quartzy silver and tan underneath. That explained it. The overhang of the cliff was likely smattered with lichen. Life found a place for itself, no matter its nature.

Then he noticed the square blocks of paving stone under his feet. This wasn't bedrock: it was a floor. He remembered the hunks of grass in the jungle, which might actually have been grass that grew over the remains of a wall. The ground around the mining outpost did look clear, even though only the landing pad was paved.

Maybe this _was_ the academy. It had had a long time to overgrow. Maybe he hadn't been crazy to think that the curve of the beach, even changed as it was by tides and storms, looked familiar.

Kilindi had been one of his first allies, before Savage, before Kasen. She had helped to guarantee some of his victories.

Maybe if he went to the Nautolan people he would find a direction. Kilindi had been pragmatic and fierce. Her family might be similar.

(He had no sense of recompense, of approaching the people whose daughter he had killed in order to apologize for that action. Instead, he worked to find what was best for himself. He had killed her impartially, after all. He did not regret following that order. Now, perhaps, he would have judged the merits or problems of preserving an ally's life over that of his Master. Savage, for example. Maul would rather that his brother had not been killed. Savage had brought him direction, had brought him, however unintentionally, a new people - the Nightsisters, the Mandalorians - to fight.

And Maul did not feel any attachment to Dathomir. Those were Savage's people, not his own. Mother Talzin had simply been a resting place for Maul. Then, after Lotho Minor, he had been in no place to have a say in things, and she, knowing that, had treated him like an animal. He did not hate her for that.

He turned and went back to the jungle.

When he got back, Kasen and the Nikto were calling for him. "Hey! You!"

"What's his name?" the Nikto asked.

"I didn't ask! Hey! You! Jedi"

As soon as Maul emerged from the foliage, they waved. Neither of them moved closer, though, and Maul could sense suspicion from both of them. Suspicion was a shaky emotion to detect, layered as it was with simpler ones like anger and loyalty. Suspicion, though, could be easily detected if you thought of it as betrayal turned inside out.

Maul marched up to the two beings. "I am no Jedi."

"You certainly answered to it.

Maul snarled. "There are more kinds of being in the galaxy than you understand. I need to go to Glee Anselm."

"Where have you been?"

Maul inclined his head toward the desert.

Kasen skipped that gesture and replied again to what Maul had said in the first place. Her eyes went wide. "I'm not sure if 'but you just kriffing got here' is an appropriate sentiment right now, but that's what I'm telling you, barve."

"I need to go to Glee Anselm," Maul repeated, using almost the same inflection. Now that he had decided on it it was almost as good as having orders.

"I helped you because I thought it's what Ralima would want me to do. But that's different from becoming your taxi service. I don't have the credits to go all the way across the galaxy," Kasen said. She glanced at the other woman.

"What is your name?" Maul asked her.

"Riet Soo-Ubo," she said. "Site Supervisor. And you are?"

He paused. "Maul."

"Oh. Of course," Kasen said. "Did you wear a lot of black in primary school?"

Maul bared his teeth, but Kasen seemed to have reached the point of no return when it came to taking him seriously. "Riet," Maul said. "You will pay Kasen to go there."

"To Glee Anselm?" Kasen said, and quickly shut up when the Nikto started speaking.

"Why? Glee Anselm is swampy. All of it. There's no mining to be done there."

Kasen shook her head.

"Do you have a ship?" Maul said.

"We take speeders to the city further along the coast," Riet said dismissively.

Maul looked at Kasen.

The human backed away, raising her hands. "Listen, you jumped out of my ship. I saved you once. Glee Anselm is on the other side of the galaxy, and this whole thing is getting a little...weird."

"And Ralima?"

Kasen sighed and lowered her hands, but only to cross them over her chest. She was clearly struggling with his own beliefs, but that was of less interest to Maul than whether he could get this ship now or another one later.

As soon as he stepped toward Kasen, he sensed that Riet had begun to see him as a threat. No more a threat than a bar room brawler, but that was because she did not know what he was a Sith. He glanced aside at her and saw her leathery skinned pulled into a frown. Like Zabraks, Nikro had small horns, but he felt no more biological loyalty to her than he did to Kasen.

The miners had taken his blaster from him. It was probably still in that prefab medical shelter.

He charged forward.

* * *

"It is not easy to lose someone."

Chancellor Palpatine was facing the wide windows of his office when Anakin came in, his back toward the Jedi. Anakin shuffled like the legendary dead.

The war had not finally caught up to him. Anakin could feel that. This other thing that had been lurking behind him had.

He should have known. Precognition - wasn't that one of the traits of the Jedi? Didn't Yoda dictate what his legions of students could and could not do based on what visions he had in his tiny, slatted meditation room? Anakin should have been able to see that this was coming. The injustice of the fact that he couldn't made him curl his hands, flesh-hand and durasteel hand, into fists.

He should have been able to see that Ahsoka was leaving.

He looked up at Palpatine like Anakin had been chastised by his words of solidarity. If the two men were closer, Anakin would have had to look down on the top of the leader of the free galaxy's balding head. As it was, Anakin stood at the base of three velvet-carpeted stairs and looked up toward the chancellor like Palpatine was the god-statue at the head of the temple.

Anakin could still see Ahsoka leaving, her back and her shoulders so thin and familiar, once alien-looking head-tails lying limp against her body, out into a world that killed and enslaved people. He could still sense her distress, but also the terrible, mature calm of her decision. He could still sense Barriss' anger, her lashing out against the council that had raised her. He had spoken to both Obi-Wan and Luminara briefly, but his mind had fogged so that he could only hear the Jedi platitudes that the other Masters may or may not have actually been saying. Maybe they could have been comforting to someone raised in the Temple. (But, Anakin thought, fighting himself - Ahsoka was also raised in the Temple, and the platitudes had meant nothing to her either.)

He stumbled up the stairs like he was more tired than the war had ever made him.

"It is difficult," Palpatine repeated.

"Do you know?" Anakin turned livid, glaring. For a moment even Palpatine seemed like an enemy, his friendliness an affront.

"No." Palpatine turned around. The sun was setting behind him, nearly gone. It had swallowed up Ahsoka but now the lights of Palpatine's office was driving it back. Red light edged Palpatine's face.

Anakin hesitated over the plush chairs. "Why are you even here? It's late. Sir."

"The trial, Anakin. The same reason you are here."

"Oh." That stunned him even if it should have been obvious. He brushed at the chair with his finger just to feel the soft strands of the fibers.

"I am sorry, Anakin." Palpatine moved closed, walking gingerly across the room. He almost seemed afraid, and now his frailty was, instead of an affront, a comfort to Anakin. Anakin had to be strong for this man. Therefore, he could also be strong for himself.

(Even though he would never see Ahsoka again. He would never hear her voice except unexpectedly, maybe, one day when he had almost forgotten it. And he would never quite think of the Jedi the same way again, not after Barriss had so completely snapped and fallen in with the dark side. If she could do that, if she could draw such conclusions, was the Temple safe? Did its philosophy _work?)_

"I know," Anakin said. He pressed a palm against his face, originally intending to lean on his elbow against the chair but then just burying his face in his own hand, feeling the warmth. "I, just don't understand. How could she be so - The council made her go. They were testing her, but she couldn't see that. And she shouldn't have! They tricked her! But they were going to let her back!"

Palpatine sat down opposite him. "You've got it, Anakin. It is not your fault, nor Ahsoka's. The council forced her to this."

Anakin looked up. "Do you think so?"

"They did not intend to, perhaps. They did not intend for this, specific, outcome. But nevertheless..."

Palpatine let that sentiment sit in the air between them. Anakin shook his head, reaching out to the Force for calm. The calmness was there, but it didn't seem to touch all parts of him. A part was still angry, still hurt. And even the heart of the Force held something hot and beating and bloody, something curling out from inside flame. Something with eyes.

The Force had, for Anakin, always been a dragon at the heart of a star's dying supernova. Right now, it was buried deep beneath all the emotions he had accumulated around Ahsoka, resentment, alienation, and patronizing teachings leading, over the five years of her apprenticeship, to respect, teamwork, and friendship.

Anakin sighed, and curled his fist.

"I just don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"Did you speak to Master Kenobi?"

"He doesn't understand," Anakin said, then reconsidered. Obi-Wan had not lost an apprentice, no. He, like many Jedi - like Anakin, he presumed - would only have one. But Obi-Wan had tried. He had made consoling noises, had recited the list of things Jedi as a unit did to comfort themselves - mantras, meditation, beautiful gardens hidden inside the Jedi Temple. "I mean, he tried," Anakin said. "He always tries."

"What do you want from me?" Palpatine asked. Instead of an expression of exasperation and defeat it was instead a powerful plea: Palpatine, Anakin knew was offering him anything it was in the chancellor's power to give to him.

But Anakin didn't know. He shook his head.

Palpatine looked around, as if finding an idea in the thin air. "Tomorrow. We'll go to the opera. I was not planning on having a guest, but they will save a seat. What do you think of Mon Calamari opera?"

"I...was not aware...of that."

"The star of the show is Mali Dabool. Very talented. They swim in a suspended bubble."

"That seems like...a waste of an awful lot of water, sir."

Palpatine chuckled. "You can decide whenever you like. The seat will be yours."

Anakin stood up, feeling dissatisfied with this conversation. The quiet had helped him, but Palpatine's words had just stirred up more thoughts. Had the council been wrong? Anakin did not doubt that they might be. Was Ahsoka wrong? She had been quiet toward him. She had actively run away and jumped off a ledge instead of talking to him. Anakin didn't know enough of what had happened while she was missing from the Temple to put together an accurate picture. Clones had chased her as if she was a criminal.

That meant that he was just left with his anger.

"Thank you, sir. I'll think about that."

"Please do."

Anakin felt Palpatine watching him as he walked out. He did not want to go back to his room in the Temple, with Ahsoka's attached suite empty, but he knew that it would be dangerous to go to Padme's suite at this time of night: there were not many air cabs around the temple, no traffic he could use as cover, no formal event in which he could at least look at her and find some solace in just the existence of her brown eyes and calm words.

It would be a challenge to get out without being detected, though. That would be a way for him to fight without hurting anyone.

Anakin Skywalker took a skycar back to the Jedi Temple. He went to the the Temple's central elevator and rode it down as far as he could, and then found the service elevator and also rode that.

* * *

Darth Maul hit Kasen with a roundhouse punch, swinging far enough out that it almost unbalanced Maul himself. Kasen did not take advantage of that, though, and a bruise blossomed fast on her face as she doubled over. As soon as Maul straightened up from the punch, Riet was right behind him. She had a hammer in her hand, small but metal-tipped. It looked heavy. She swung, and the head of the hammer almost hit Kasen as Maul moved to the left, leaving Riet facing his right shoulder. He backhanded her with a closed fist, and she reeled back but did not drop the hammer. Maul walked toward Kasen's ship, slowly. When Riet and Kasen started to follow him he picked the Nikto up with the Force and tossed her at the human. Both of them landed in a pile meters away, groaning and wounded. Maul could feel Kasen's shock.

Riet shouted into a commlink that she held in a shaking hand while she was still on the ground. It was possible, from the way her leg was cocked, that she had broken her leg or her knee. Maul kept walking. He broke into a run when he sensed the panic beginning to spread around the facility as the other miners realized something was wrong. The sky was still a clear blue. It was hard to imagine that this was the same location as the Orsis Academy he had attended, but Maul felt the same as he left. The Academy had been more ruined than this.

He reached the ship just as beings in uniforms similar to Riet's were emerging out of the prefab buildings, stumbling and uncoordinated. He did not immediately see any weapon more sophisticated than a hammer, although one miner held a silver box that Maul did not recognize but might be a sonic tool designed to shake rock to its constituent pieces.

He jumped to the ship in one Force-assisted leap and felt the fear in the group increase.

_Fear is my ally._

The ship was locked, as Maul had known that it would be. He snarled and balled his hands into fists, wishing he could break in without compromising the life support. A ship this small, this old, this model, whatever had dictated how the back half of it worked, had not put in an air lock.

Instead, there was a security panel on the outside designed to receive a four-digit code. He didn't recognize the model, but there was a panel on the back. Maul popped it off.

A blaster whined, and Maul turned around to see a miner holding what looked like Maul's own weapon that he had stolen from his would be-jailer. Maul reached out his hand, summoned the Force, and grabbed the gun and the man's wrist at the same time.

The wrist broke and the blaster flew toward him. It smacked into his hand, but as soon as he grabbed it he knew he didn't really want it. He was done with this sneaking, done with running. He had no time limit.

He put the blaster back in his belt.

A miner ran around the corner of a building toward him, holding that silver weapon he had seen earlier. He had been right to think that it was a sonic device of some kind. The miner, a fat-faced, red-skinned male Twi'lek with his short lekku held behind him and tied together with thick straps, screamed as he pointed the box toward the escapee. Maul immediately felt his ears start ringing and his muscles loosen. He felt suddenly, rapidly ill. When he tried to walk forward toward the box, the queasiness continued and his eyelids grew heavier over shaking vision.

He summoned the Force again. Immediately the world gained clarity. Maul turned the machine around in its wielder's hands and pointed it toward his face.

He screamed, and Maul could see blood vessels in his face breaking, turning his face first pink and then bruise-dark red. The spasms of the Twi'lek's arms eventually knocked the device away by themselves, and it lay in the dirt while the man backed up, looking at his own hands as if he was seeing horrible visions while blood leaked from under his eyes.

More people were emerging now, crowding Maul. A klaxon started ringing.

_All this to stop one man from leaving a mine_, Maul thought. _The fight at the Academy was better. Those children were trained. And unlike Kasen, they did not hesitate._

Maul turned to the left just in time to see Riet swing the hammer down toward him. She was shorter than him, but not by much, with a muscular build in even her neck and her hands. He caught her forearm on his and pushed back. She aimed a punch, which he caught and twisted, nearly exposing the back of her neck as the weight of the hammer dragged her down.

When she reared up again it was to aim a more controlled jab with the hammer head at his stomach. Now it looked like she had fought with the weapon before instead of just broken rock with it, but Maul had been in enough fights to know that, especially among non-Force users, it was hard to tell whether any one had experience or not. Force users tended to move in proscribed ways passed down from master to student to student again, and even if they operated under vastly different schools or philosophies he would recognize a stance there, a kick here, a recovery there. Riet could have been a professional martial artist or could have never hit anyone before in her life. He would never know.

He stepped neatly to turn at right angles to her, swiveling his feet. The Nikto reacted quickly and swung again with the hammer, but she had swung wild and wasn't even close enough to force him to move backward.

When she swung again he grabbed her wrist with one hand and punched her in the side of the head with the other. She kicked out, hit his knee, and shouted as her foot jolted against his metal leg. She was wearing durasteel-tipped boots, though: the metals rang against each other, injuring Riet less than Maul wound have hoped.

Instead she hit back, one punch glancing off his arm, the other striking his chest and hurting. He grabbed the hammer. For a moment they struggled: she was strong, with a low center of gravity. She would be hard to unbalance.

He hit her again. The light in her eyes just kept getting flintier.

The hammer had a pike on the opposite end, for smashing rocks. He hooked a chunk of her clothing with the pike and then felt it tear into her stomach. Now Riet gasped, pushed away, jerked once like a fish on a line. She fell away bleeding. Maul held the bloodied hammer up and pulled his blaster with the other hand when he sensed more people coming around the side of the buildings.

One of them had brought a vehicle, a two-legged robot with the pilot squished tightly inside. Maul threw the hammer, backed its flight with the Force. It broke through the cockpit and into the driver's skull.

He shot twice with the blaster in no particular direction, just to get the other miners to back up, before returning to the casing of the security pad. He tossed the casing aside and tore out the wires inside the pad that his Master had taught him about.

A light on the door glowed green, and the ramp began descending.

Judging by Kasen's lack of security measures here, the bridge wouldn't pose much of a challenge either. Maul had stepped one foot inside the ship when Kasen emerged from behind a building.

The mech was still stomping forward, the corpse hanging limp in the chair.

"I did you a favor!" Kasen yelled.

"Maybe the reason you aren't a good businesswoman is that you think people will return your favors," Maul said, and gestured with the Force. He flung Kasen against the side of the mech, stunning her.

The mech plodded toward her while the human lifted herself up off of the ground and groaned, her eyes fixed with sudden horror upon Riet's body. She seemed fixated on it for a moment. Maul used that moment to step further inside the ship and find the button to close the door from the inside. He watched the mech plod slowly toward the disoriented Kasen. The human had almost fainted. Her eyes were very while, the irises trying to hide behind her brows even as Kasen lolled, arms swaying, trying fruitlessly to motivate her flagging brain to get up and move toward the mining camp's fallen leader.

The mech was striding thoughtlessly across the ground. The pilot must have fallen, or gotten his death grip on, the forward yoke. Kasen would be crushed if she didn't snap out of her shock. Maul thought, for just a moment, about helping her.

A miner did. A Meerian woman dashed across the open space, seemingly unarmed, and shoved her arms under Kasen's. She dragged her out of the way while the ship's ramp closed and Maul headed for the bridge, quick, not a glance for the statue of the reptilian goddess.

The ship was, as he had predicted, easy to launch even without Kasen's presence. The security, like the display console and the rest of the ship, was outdated. Maul sat down and was able to start the engines almost immediately. There should have been a warm-up sequence, he knew - he was breaking all the rules of flying by taking off fast. But he could set down again just as fast, thousands of miles away, and do the preflight list then before plotting his final course for Glee Anselm.

The miners didn't seem to have any heavier defenses than the mech, because nothing struck the side of the ship as the engines turned on and revved up. Maul saw a few people move furtively between the prefab buildings, and could tell that a group had gathered behind the medical center, but now they were frightened. They were scouts, some of them were probably used to a board room, and the others had never expected to be using their pickaxes as weapons. They were cowed now. Riet had been the one with the most fight in her.

He wondered whether she would live.

The horizon tipped as he lifted off. The sky was still blue, the ocean calm, only the jungle giving any hint of the darkness that had once taken place at the training academy for child soldiers. Inside the jungle the shadows were deep and the colors fungal. It surprised Maul that more of them hadn't stretched exploratory tendrils and spores toward the prefab buildings already. Maybe they had.

As the ship hummed around him and he began to head toward cruising altitude, a great sense of peace came over him. Finally, he had freedom again.


	5. Chapter 5

Maul did indeed stop to do the preflight check in a more remote part of Orsis. This landscape was more like what he remembered, scraggly and rocky, one step up from a desert. Even here, though, mining machines could be seen on the horizon.

For most of the trip, Maul researched Glee Anselm. It wasn't difficult to find a database of hundreds of Motoko families, although since Maul had no idea what region Kilindi had come from or what her parents' names were, the list was only slightly more useful than a map of the entire planet.

The other thing that the research told him was that life on Glee Anselm was easier for an aquatic being than one that thrived only on land. Glee Anselm probably wouldn't look like it had a glut of water for a species like Mon Calamarians or Kaminoans, but it had enough that most of the dwellings were, he read, built half in and half out of either the saltwater sea or freshwater rivers and canals. There had to be enough dry land for emissaries of the Republic to walk on, though, and the holonet informed him that he shouldn't have trouble finding someone who spoke Basic.

There was a bit of a cultural divide on Glee Anselm, and one which, after getting sidetracked on Bandomeer, Maul did not want to accidentally disrupt. The Anselmi species had been basically forgotten by the Republic Senate after the Nautolan species had driven them to live, in ever-decreasing tribal numbers, in the remotest seas.

Then there was the problem of finding the Motoko family. It was important that he get to them, specifically. They had, for whatever reason, sent their daughter to a training camp for mercenaries. Some of the children Maul had fought beside had been orphans who had fallen into the underworld and found an affinity for it, while others were from underworld families, and had the full support of their parents and often their entire social network in their movement toward making hired assassin their career choice. Others had been runaways, who chose the life of an assassin because of the dark prestige. Just like any of the other groups, some of these succeeded and others did not. They must have been good at finding people in order to even know that the Orsis Academy existed.

Near the end of the trip, Maul blinked and pushed at the seat of Kasen's ship. He had kept the place clean, ignored the statue of the goddess, and realized that he would need to pick up fuel on Glee Anselm if not closer in order to get anywhere else.

_Focus_, he thought.

Thinking too hard about Kilindi's family and what he would do when he got there made his brain fuzz, made his thoughts track toward her like trains on fixed rails. Wheels turning, arms pumping, stretching out across the world. He had not been greatly attached to her when he had killed her - now, it was almost like she was a ghost.

_Focus._

He was seeking solace, or something, from the people whose daughter he had murdered.

This would not be easy.

And he would likely get sidetracked from solace. The mean worming discontent that he had felt since Sidious abandoned him was tied up in all of these desires for focus. Maul needed to cast those things aside. He could use his single-mindedness as an ally as well as a curse.

He had never even had to think about that before.

For a while he distracted himself with the maintenance of the ship. Cleaning, minor repairs, and simply knowing what was what in this strange craft occupied him for most of the long journey. In between, he trained, shoving things to the side in the living room so that he could do katas and stretches. He powerfully wished for a lightsaber in his hand but had no idea where he would get one unless he came upon a Jedi he could easily pick off. There were surely one or two Jedi envoys or Watchmen on Glee Anselm.

He shook his head. He shouldn't want them to find him...or at least not as badly as he did.

The trip left him shaken and antsy. He had settled on going to the city with the highest number of Motokos. For whatever regional reason, and to Maul's great satisfaction, it was not a particularly large settlement. It stretched along one of the many coasts, a city on paper but really spread out into multiple districts or villages set on different patches of dry ground. The spaceport was open to visitors, only requiring a decontamination process against various alien diseases which, the travel guide said, should take only a few minutes.

Maul only learned the ship's name then, when he read it off of the identification screen when he had to descend to the spaceport. The name was _Jeklo Coli. _Maul had no idea what that meant.

When he arrived on Glee Anselm the moisture was so thick in the air that it ran down the walls. There were glistening puddles on the floor presenting reflections of the black metal ceiling overhead. Nautolan workers moved back and forth around the walls of the spaceport, carefully staying beyond the painted red and yellow lines to avoid the wash from the engine. Their long, green tentacles lay loose around their backs and over their shoulders.

Maul went through processing quickly. The techs were more worried about identifying bacteria than about identifying individuals. Decontamination was a swift process, although both signs and attendants told him that a change of clothes was recommended (body and clothes went through separate sprayers), and Maul did not have this option available. Providing for clothing was beginning to be a priority. Or, he could wash his in the sea.

As soon as he stepped outside the spaceport Maul was faced with a more rustic scene than the modern interior had led him to believe. Speeder taxis were queued up outside the spaceport, although this seemed to be a quiet period. There were only three businessmen, all Nautolan, waving down cars. The fashion on this planet seemed not unusual by Coruscant standards: the men clearly wore suits, although of a more flowing cut that crossed at the necks like Maul's own robes. One family of a species Maul didn't recognize - humanoid but with three large eyes - were packing suitcases into the trunk of another large speeder driven by one of their kind. The air smelled salty.

A sign had been written in flimsi, laminated, and nailed to a board just outside the spaceport. It showed directions to the nearest hotels and restaurants, of which there were few. This was not a tourist town. Maul looked to either side, wondering where to go. The road turned into dirt one hundred meters from the spaceport on either side.

He had memorized a few addresses of Motokos in the ship, and had an idea of the layout of the town, but had no commlink or personal computer to help him if he got very lost. The Force could probably guide him back to the spaceport, which had the largest concentration of people.

He headed toward a suburb called the Glen, which he had seen on the map. It was further inland than most of the rest of the city, set on an island in a swamp which was accessible by a high drawbridge.

Almost as soon as he got out of sight of the spaceport he saw that the town was quaint. The buildings were odd mixtures of stilted above-ground dwellings and pools, encircled by seaweed or rocks, which presumably housed even more underwater rooms. There was a town hall next to a general store next to a more modern-looking mall that displayed both fashionable clothing and diving suits in the windows.

His inability to swim in the water without the weight of his legs dragging him down would be a liability here.

He passed the mall and walked on to a landscape made almost entirely of bridges and sculpted ground. He was clearly getting further into the swamp, although the natives had done their best to separate squishy ground into sea-parts and land-parts. Small dams and locks dotted the flat land, with artfully decorated railings scattered throughout on the higher ground.

There were very few trees. One suburb seemed to have a cluster of them, and Maul thought that it was a safe bet to assume that that was the Glen. He could certainly be wrong - it could have been named hundreds of years ago, at a time when the area looked differently. But it was a start.

There seemed to be no laws at all about where or where not someone could jump into the water: Maul saw two Nautolans walking along the thin, dirt path ahead of him and one swimming with a child. He could only see the tops of their green heads as they moved quickly through the water. They could have been animals, migrating inland. The sun was hot, though, and Maul imagined that the cool water must be a welcome relief. It was about as warm here as it had been on Orsis, much hotter than Bandomeer, and humid but not muggy.

He crossed one bridge just out of curiosity, and saw a cluster of low houses beyond it. These weren't raised up on stilts. Instead, he saw gray buoys arranged around them. Were the houses floating? Perhaps they were tethered underneath. The ocean, more gray than blue here in the deeper water, made rippling waves around them.

Just beyond the bridge, a girl was fishing. She wore a loose red tunic and yellow pants, and her head-tails were decorated with wide bands in the same colors. She looked to be in her mid-teens, and was skinny to a degree that Maul almost thought might be unhealthy: her ankles and bare feet were tiny, with all of the bones outlined under her green skin. The cast of that skin looked healthy, though, and she reeled in the fishing line with practiced confidence. She had a metal cooler next to her, presumably holding the day's catch, and an overcoat lay rumpled on the neatly cut grass beside her.

The line she reeled in, though, held nothing. Maul couldn't see her expression as she examined the fibers, then tossed it back in again. In the Force, she did not feel particularly perturbed or disappointed.

She glanced up almost as soon as she saw him watching her, and although he could have loitered meters away pretending to look at something else, he approached instead. It was no use dawdling, figuring out what passed as polite on this planet.

The rod stayed in the water, bobbing slightly. Instead of taking her hands off it to look at him she simply switched them and turned slightly to look over her shoulder.

He couldn't threaten to push her into the water. It would have to be the Force or the blaster then.

As soon as she opened her mouth to speak he said, "I am looking for the Motoko family."

"I don't know anyone by that name," she said. She was soft-spoken. Regardless of how her species aged, that voice would make her sound young.

"I also need work, during my search."

She looked around. "Do you live here?"

"No. I just arrived."

She paused. "Are you a murderer?"

There was no correct way to answer that question. He tried to find one anyway. "I do not think so."

She smiled tightly, tentatively. He wondered if she knew where the nearest security station was. "What's your name?" She said.

"Maul."

This did not elicit a reaction any more than his appearance had. Perhaps she didn't know enough Basic. Whatever it was, Maul was finding that humans were just about the only species that found his appearance inherently frightening. Not every species told stories about devils with horns and red skin, and not all of them knew what "Maul" meant. There was a certain elitism in even naming oneself using a Basic word, since humans tended to think that since they were one of the fastest-breeding species in the galaxy they were right by virtue of majority, but that lent itself well to the Sith, who knew themselves to be right by virtue of minority.

"And you're traveling?"

"Yes. Looking for the family of my friend."

"Did you lose her?"

Which way? He wondered. There were many ways to lose people. He couldn't tell which one she meant, not by her inflection and not by her age. If she thought like a child, the question would be innocent. If she thought like a teenager, the question would be derisive. If she thought like an adult, the question would be pitying.

"Yes," he said, not sadly, to get the measure of her.

A few of her headtails flipped, the tips jumping up. He wasn't sure what that meant, but a moment later she seemed to have reached her decision on whether or not he was a murderer. "My grandmother is looking for help," she said. "Can you fish?"

Maul couldn't help but smile at the fact that she trusted him. How foolish she was, to believe this half-lie he had told. He had killed Motoko, and not looked back. The girl would be shocked, at the least, to know that. Instead, as he kept it from her it became a glowing spark inside his throat, a laughing secret that he lorded over her. To her, the emotion in his eyes would look like glee.

But now that she had started to trust him, he would have to deal with that as much as he would have had to deal with mistrust otherwise. Trust, someone knowing your name, was just another kind of burden sometimes. Kasen's persistence, while Maul was thankful for certain results of it, had proven that.

Could he fish. Maul hesitated. He was good at killing most things - should fish be an exception?

"Yes." He said. "Although I may have to be taught the traditions of your world."

She looked askance at him. "Fishing's fishing," she said with some surprise. Her tendrils all slid over her shoulder and disappeared behind her back, fast, like a brightly-colored anemone withdrawing into a hole in the ground. "Unless there's less gravity or something. Then maybe you have to look up."

"Take me to your grandmother."

"It's right over there." The girl pointed. "If you murder me, she'll see you. I just want you to know that."

Maul nodded. He needed to stay under cover for this mission. Although it was likely that the Motokos had no idea he was coming or even that he existed, he did not think that drawing a lot of attention to himself was the right way to go.

It had not ended very well last time.

She took her time reeling in her line, carefully stowing it away separate from the rod, in a wooden box. She affixed both to her person in order to carry them: the box went into a clip on her belt that Maul would have guessed had been specially sized for it, and the rod she slung over her shoulder.

The first time she turned her back on him she kept looking over her shoulder, her head-tails separating to allow her to look between them, looking more like a starfish's legs and less like human hair.

Then she walked briskly, though, leading him toward the village. Her grandmother's house was close. If she had screamed, the grandmother would most likely have heard it. Maul glanced at the bridge into the Grove proper, but the girl did not lead him that way.

The grandmother's home's connection to the water was not immediately apparent. The home looked like a very squat hut, much more enclosed than the other houses in the neighborhood. It looked less flood-resistant, less natural than the others. Maybe it was older, or newer, but it looked almost human.

The girl didn't knock in order to get in. She just pressed open the door.

Inside was a clutter of artwork. The mediums were varied: metal, paper, stone, but the style was consistent: natural, abstract forms, often climbing high or spiking upward, art impaled on metal rods. There were no faces, no recognizable forms or function. It was art for art's sake, and it would all likely be lost in the next flood.

The floor plan was open. Maul did see the home's connection to the water soon after he walked in; behind a table piled with sculptures there was simply a square hole in the ground, like a trap door without the hatch. The water beneath was deep and dark. Maul did not think that the girl's grandmother had tunneled straight down into the ground and found this: the whole town would be sinking if that were the case, and it looked as stable and dry as a town in an archipelago could be. The passage through the water must have been carved. Adding to that impression were the almost perfectly square walls that looked like they had been cut by a machine, or at least with intelligent intent. The passage went down maybe eight feet, deep enough for any natural size of Zabrak to completely submerge but not wide enough for them to turn around. If someone dived in head-first, they would need to go head-first. If they dived in feet-first they would need to go on feet-first, until they got to a bend in the passage. The water got darker there, but was colored in deep greens and blues and purple, perhaps reflections of the colors of algae covering the passage with a fuzzy carpet.

He looked up when the old woman shuffled something on her desk and looked up. Moving away from the pit, he saw that she was almost hidden behind a workbench piled with...something.

The old woman was surrounded by transparent sculptures - small globes, mostly, some hanging from wire frames and some strung like bracelets or necklaces. At her work bench she was creating a new one, holding one of the transparent, reflective balls (it looked exactly like a bubble) with one hand and a small black device with a pincer at the end in the other hand. There was a pile of the pincer things at her right hand. Her skin was a darker green than the girl's, with large dark pine splotches covering her forehead and extending onto her head tails. The skin there was not as deeply wrinkled as on her face, but showed the same crowfoot signs of age.

"This being is looking for work," said the girl, using the multi-species term 'being' since it was politer than 'man.' "He said he can fish. I know you were looking for someone to take advantage of the larger schools..."

Maul realized then that the girl might be hiring him to do her job. Time would tell him whether she wasn't very good at fishing or whether she had something else she would rather do. He certainly hadn't seen her catch anything so far.

Except for him.

"Where are you from?" The older Nautolan asked. Her voice was cracked but strong, and slightly accented.

"Bandomeer," he said without thinking much about it. He set that idea firmly in his mind. He would probably have to corroborate that lie with other people.

"And what is it you wear?" She looked at him intently, and Maul had to touch his own collar to remember that he was still wearing the necklace that Mother Talzin had given him in order to help him find Savage.

"It was given to me."

"On your home planet?"

He paused. "No."

She stood up, revealing a brownish-green tunic and pants under a thin, faded black shawl edged with equally faded green and gold tassels. "It's very pretty. What is it made of?"

He did not hold the talisman out, although she seemed to want to touch it. "I do not know."

She smiled. "Well, maybe we can find out. I have work," she said. "If you fish for me, I will pay you. Young Athon-Emen will teach you." Maul could tell that the girl had gotten her inflection from her grandmother, although the girl's accent was the widely used one that Maul had grown up hearing most often among the commoners who lived around the Galactic Senate. Maul himself tended toward an upper-class accent, but Sidious, in his role as Chancellor Palpatine, had decided on something between the two, something that would make most people he spoke to think that he might have come from their home planet, their home town.

The Nautolan girl and her grandmother spoke with the natural version of this faked kinship, in the same, slow way.

"Athonemen," Maul repeated.

"_Athon_-E_men_." The girl pronounced her own name slowly, leaning forward. For the first time, she seemed comfortable with getting closer to him. Some barrier had broken. He had, presumably, shifted out of the _murderer _category into the more convivial _stranger. _

Her grandmother resumed her calm speech as if nothing had interrupted it, although perhaps a bit more assertively. "However, as you can see I have no room to house anyone in this cottage. I am sorry. There is a hostel near the airport if you want cheap accommodations. Even tell Ravel at the front desk that I sent you: it might be worth your time."

Maul nodded.

"When does he start?" Athon-Emen asked excitedly. Maul mentally put one check mark in the 'she has something to do besides fishing' category.

"Tomorrow morning. Come to this house when you're ready. I would like if it was before noon, but there is no rush at first."

"At first?"

"Yes."

He liked her seriousness, the way she laid down the rules without explicitly stating them.

Maul nodded. Now that the formalities were done, he focused on his mission again. "I am looking for a family named Motoko. Do you know of them?"

"Hmm." The grandmother thought about it. "Visal Motoko was on the town council until very recently. I think he lived in the Glen. He was a stormsurfer."

Maul tipped his head.

"He would go out in the hurricanes. Half of the council thought he would be killed. Or thought he was too old for it." She laughed quietly. Maul had a feeling that she respected what he did.

"Do you know anything else about him?"

"That's it. You could attend a council. Even if he's not there they might know."

"Thank you."

"I'll see you tomorrow." She looked at his talisman again, but did not ask any more about it.

When he went outside, Athon-Emen did not follow him, and he did not look back to see whether her grandmother, whose name he still did not know, had sat down. He had no intention of going to a hostel: he would sleep in the ship. That way he wouldn't have to pay for both birthing for the ship and a room for himself. He had Kasen's food stores too, enough to last him at least a week.

He walked back to the spaceport, smelling the sea and the sky. There were more people out now, although not much time had passed while he was in Athon-Emen's grandmother's house. The whiff of spring and the smell of wet dirt churned up under someone's feet were both relaxing and strange. The season was stirring, and Maul had jumped around to so many planets in the last year that his body didn't even know what to do with that fact any more.

Having a job and a cover story didn't help him find the Motokos, however.

Inside the ship he ate a ration bar and a previously frozen piece of fruit and headed back out to the Glen. He held on to the Dathomirian talisman for a moment, pulling it against his neck until it chafed. Savage had given this to him. Supposedly, it contained a blot of Maul's own blood, collected when he was training on Orsis. Maul had taken it from Savage when they had been traveling together. His brother had left it on a table, and, when Maul picked it up, not protested.

_"I don't need it any more," Savage said._

_ This was before the Mandalorians but after Maul had kicked Savage into submission, a submission which ultimately revealed some sort of brotherly bond between them despite their very recent reunion and Maul's complete lack of memories of his family. The Dathomirian's (for Maul thought of Savage as Dathomirian but himself as a Zabrak) forgetfulness was not a sign of a grudge or a ploy: it simply happened. Savage was pushed along by life instead of making choices, but Maul respected things about that and knew in a way that it was no different from the way his own life under Sidious had gone. Savage had simply been born or re-born into less stable circumstances. If Maul could have given Savage to a Sith Master that Maul knew would not abandon Savage or use him as a pawn, Maul would have done that. _

_ Savage had dropped the talisman onto the table, hard. It had made a thumping sound. Maul picked it up more gently, since precision was his way and brutality was Savage's._

_ Maul wondered whether there was still some sort of power in the thing. He didn't like the idea that it was magic - there was no such thing as magic. The talisman did not work off of any of the capabilities of the Force, though, not if Sidious had come at all close to teaching Maul the extent of the Force's abilities. _

_ Even if midi-chlorians in the blood could 'sense' midi-chlorians in the source of the blood, why would they glow this way? It was irrelevant to Maul whether the Force had some sort of larger consciousness or not. He used it so much, practically constantly, and thought that if it had wanted to tell him something in a way that a sentient being would, it would have done so already. A consciousness that did not communicate was no more useful than a non-sentient Force of nature - which could be very useful indeed. There was no use thinking about its will, though._

_ At this point, Force philosophy got touchy, since 'the will of the Force' was a phrase often bandied about. The Sith had an easy solution to this, however. The Sith would do what they wished regardless, and the will of the Force, which was as indicated in the very word to create people with great power, was that one person gain the most power possible. Which person this _was _did not matter so much as how much power they had._

_ This was part of Sidious' philosophy regarding the rumored Chosen One. No matter what form the Chosen One took, the person who controlled him, her, or it would still be more powerful. This idea had lead Darth Bane to seek the Sith'Ari and it had lead Darth Sidious to seek the Chosen One. History would reveal which was more powerful, although it hardly mattered. Darth Bane was dead. In that regard, Sidious had won._

_ Darth Maul sometimes enjoyed his status as tool of a greater power and sometimes resented it. These opinions varied depending on the day, the situation, and the amount of desperation he was feeling._

_ "Leave it," he said to Savage as Maul looked at the talisman._

_ "If you wish."_

_ "I do," said Maul, and almost hissed._

_ His brother backed away. _

_ Maul had kept the talisman out of a sense of protectiveness: not over his brother, and not even over his own blood, but over the Force. He would place what he ddi not understand next to his heart until he understood it. Whether that placement was a strangulation or an embrace did not matter._

Maul headed for the Grove. Athon-Emen was no longer in her fishing spot: Maul glanced at it as he passed. Her grandmother's door was closed. Beyond that the houses were bigger, with more elaborate porches. He could tell that even these were braced against hurricane winds. Some of them had pendulums on the bottom, as if the whole thing was designed to balance itself. A clockwork living space.

As soon as he crossed the gently curved wooden bridge into the area designated as the Grove, he saw that the houses were closer together here. It looked like an area that was not well travelled by spacers, but still provided enough amenities to its residents to be a sort of community all on its own: there was a shop in the center containing both a grocery store and a library. Slaughtered fish, silver and blue, had been arrayed in long rows in wooden boxes. There was an almost overwhelming smell of fish and salt. No one seemed to be walking around the thin paths between houses. The driveways looked too thin to contain speeders, although he didn't see any animal conveyance either. There were a few Nautolans in the shop.

Multiple homes had long surf boards sitting in the front yards, on the sides, or bobbing in the water behind them. (Every house in this puzzle-piece of a development backed into the swampy sea.) He chose the largest one as the one most likely to belong to the councilman Motoko. It looked grand enough to both keep up appearances and house children.

After choosing the home that he thought was most likely that belonging to his target, he went back to his stolen ship and pulled up HoloNet records for that address. Indeed, it was listed as belonging to his target.

He went out again that night.

There was no fence around the yard. Maul had gotten the impression that there weren't many fences in Nautolan towns, or at least not in this region: they would just tip over in the swampy ground, and Nautolans were not as touchy about their personal space as many humans were. Nevertheless, there was a private Coruscant courtyard feel to the grassy lawn outside the Motoko house. The carpet of grass was pine-green in the darkness. Glee Anselm's moons had not yet risen. Later in the day, there would be a soft green glow on the horizon from the reflected satellites and the algae thriving in the sea.

There was no fence to jump.

The Motokos had a ladder up to the on-land portion of their house. The underwater portion was accessed by a wooden porch, wider and more like a connecting corridor than the one on most of the other houses he had seen. That pathway would be open to the elements during storm except for the canvas sheets Maul could see folded at intervals along the open walkway. Maul imagined that they would be unfurled to create a sort of tunnel of canvas during mild rain storms, and shut again on sunny days or on storms so severe that they might blow the canvas away.

Maul arrived at the house from nearer the water and jumped up the ladder, clinging like a spider at the fourth rung before scurrying up further. He had picked the right night. There was a sense of tension in the room above. He heard people moving around, cutlery clacking with a dull sound like wood instead of a sharp sound like metal.

He heard snatches of conversation, in both a male and female voice.

"I don't think that will be necessary."

"We could donate to your cause. A cause of your choice, that is. There are various charities..."

"Hurricane Salav survival rates..."

And then a second male voice, this one deeper. It sounded older, like the man had worn out his throat with death sticks, or simply with age. "We will bring this up at the next meeting of the family. You planned to host it, correct?"

"Yes," said the woman hesitantly. But not here. There is a cantina in town that we thought might be good."

"Red Curtain."

One good thing about Nautolans was that you could hear their head gestures. The woman's head tails shushed and scratched against her clothing as she nodded or shook her head, bur a moment later Maul got his confirmation on which one it was. "That's the place."

Maul gripped the ladder, hanging close to it so that no one could see him from the road. He had done a similar thing when he had been listening in on InterGalactic Ore miners many years ago, the first time he had run into that ill-fated company. This time, he hoped, his stealth efforts would go more successfully. He had, after all, learned something from his mistake. And he needed not to show his face here if he was going to stay with Amon-Emen and her grandmother and become a recognized, benevolent part of the community.

He was going to have to buy a cloak with a cowl.

And then visit the Red Curtain.

But when?

The gravely-voiced man, who Maul assumed but was not positive was a Nautolan as well, wanted to know the same thing. "I know Rakosh does his work there. He is usually in late..."

"We were thinking at 20 hours," the younger man said. "Good time for a drink, not too late."

The older man nodded. He seemed displeased with the other man's increasingly casual tone, though, and adopted an angrier one. "Fine. Have a good evening, friends. I'll see you at Rakosh's." Slowly, and with what Maul imagined was a grumpy grandeur, he moved toward the door. Maul could hear the floor creak.

The Zabrak released the rung of the ladder. He fell fast, cushioning his drop with the Force only slightly in an almost instinctual reliance on it. He used the Force as easily as he used any of his senses.

He eased around the side of the house, his boots sinking into the damp grass.

The older Nautolan came out armed. He was dressed in a long, piratical coat, but Maul could immediately tell that he was holding something that was probably a weapon: a long stick. At first Maul could not even tell, in the dimness, whether it was the long barrel of a gun or a sword, but then from the way the man held it and presented himself to the night Maul realized that it was a cudgel or shock stick, maybe even something that could be disguised as a walking cane. The Force also told Maul that the Nautolan was not anticipating an attack. He was using the weapon both just in case there was anyone waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder and as a flamboyance. The Nautolan liked to appear ready, liked to swing the stick at people just to see them jump. Anything that was sinister about him could also be interpreted as jovial.

Maul watched him go, never revealing himself. The Nautolan looked around, but never past the corner of the house, and he was clearly unable to feel the Force. Maul did not think that he would pose much of a threat, now or in the future. He memorized the bulky shape of the old man's shoulders, though. Unable to see much of the man's head shape or face, Maul would rely mostly on the Force to recognize his presence, which was also weary, skeptical, sinister, and jovial.

Then, through a gap in a green curtain in the house above him, Maul got his first look at Kilindi Motoko's parents.

He barely remembered the shape of the young assassin's face, but thought he saw it reflected in the mother's long face and thin lips. She had big eyes - but then, all Nautolans did - and a small chin, making her face almost perfectly, bizarrely triangular. The father had a missing head tail, and did not make an effort to hide it. In fact it was one of the head tails that hung just in front of his left shoulder, and was one of the first things Maul noticed about the man, even from a distance.

They were talking, making subtle gestures with their hands and head tails, and were not angry about the conversation in which they had just participated. Their attitude was businesslike. They had clearly not taken anything personally. Maul watched them for a moment, but knew that his position was precarious, and departed.

On the way back, he thought about what he had learned. The two were part of something - something that the older Nautolan was also part of, which necessitated late-night meetings with friendly bartenders. There was also charity work involved, but the whole conversation had had an aura of clandestine nastiness about it that made Maul think that there was more politicking than good will going on here. The charity had been discussed like a business venture, which perhaps it was. He had a bad feeling about it, though.

Which could be very useful. If the older man was bribing the councilman Motoko in order to get something done for him, Maul would file that information away and see if he could use it.

(For what? He thought, back in his brain where he didn't want to think about it too hard. What mission was he on, right now? To find out about the family, yes, but - he was purposefully making it hard on himself, making it run like one of Sidious' missions. Almost exactly like one of them, in fact, if he considered both InterGalactic Ore, the skulking on ladders, and the political corruption.

What was he here for?

He had to tell the Motokos that he knew their daughter at one point. Athon-Emen would notice if he kept passing them by without addressing the thing that he had told Athon-Emen he had come to this planet to do.

But he wasn't ready to just walk up to their front door. That would be too easy.

As it happened, the next day, something different but almost as easy presented itself.

The Motoko patriarch interrupted Maul's first fishing lesson.


End file.
